First stop ATI technologies. Last year I had a bit of a problem finding the pavilions where ATI's staff is being housed. It's kinda like playing hide and seek. Luckily this year they where located on the same position as last year and read this well .. that would be on the roof-top of a 50 meter high building. The meeting was with Nils Horstbrink, Rubeena Hussein and Chris Hook. Basically I really was hoping to see the new R420 demonstrated as it's getting so close to the launch, plus I was hoping to get some more technical information about it.
ATI simply is not telling anything. It was to be honest a bit of a disappointment. No confirmation on the new name, codename, clockspeed, pipelines, memory, features, technology .. so that would be ... nothing. A bit of a shame, but that's how these things work.
So I'll share with you the speculation/gossip on this product; we expect: 160M transistors (9800 XT has 110), 500MHz core clock, 8 pipe design, 6 vertex engines, 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 at likely ~1 GHz. The R420/423 chips will offer twice the pixel fill rate and vertex throughput of the R350 core, as well as increases in memory bandwidth. R423 is to be expected the PCI-Express version.
Luckily at a certain point of the meeting they did bring out the new RV380, but again they would not tell anything about it, no clocks, memory etc etc. If we go and speculate a bit then RV380 is the new mid-range product with specs like these: 0.13-micron low-k manufacturing process, 475 MHz core clock, 4 pipe design, 2 vertex engines, 128/256MB 128-bit (600 - 800MHz data rate), single slot PCI-Express design. It looks like RV380 is just a PCI-Express derivative of the RV360 yet that's unconfirmed as the exact configuration we just don't know.
The new product will be launched soon though, likely mid-April around the same time NVIDIA will launch it's next generation product. Well, what did we discuss in this meeting, PCI-Express of course. What is PCI-Express you ask ? A new slot that will slowly replace the AGP port. The AGP port is at the end of it's life cycle. As you know AGP is now at 8x (2GB/sec), and I know I can't say it like that, but think of PCI-Express in terms of AGP 16x. It's effectively doubling bandwidth from 2 GB/sec towards a bi-directional 4 GB/sec. ATI has a native solution for PCI-Express where NVIDIA will use it's High Speed Interconnect bridged solution to handle the translation from the multiple serial busses to the cards native AGP interface.
From top to bottom ATI will have PCI-Express solution available when the market picks up that trend. We believe that will be somewhere in May. ATI is clearly in a waiting state until we'll actually see mainbords with PCI-Express on the market.
ATI's staff holding the RV380.
The RV380 - The upcoming mid-range product. ATI has its reference cards made by ASUS.
ATI also had a stand in another Hall for consumers. A few board partners where there.
Also a small setup for people to play games.
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