ATI X1xxx Series News

[bottle]

**RV530 Radeon X1600 will come in two flavours **

XT is 600 MHZ+, STD 500MHz+

ATI IS PREPARING a lot of surprises for its first week of October launch. Not only it will launch at least four versions of famous and troublesome R520 high end marchitecture, it is planning to release its Shader model 3.0 versions of a mainstream solution.
The card that we used to call RV530 got its commercial name and will be called the Radeon X1600 and will come in two flavors. The faster version of its architecture will be called Radeon X1600 and will have twelve pipelines and work at a 600MHz plus clock. The clock speeds are being finalised as we speak, but this sounds like a very fast mainstream card to me.

RV530 is re-named to the Radeon X1600 and we will possibly start to call this card a Standard. This core will also feature twelve pipelines and will work at faster clocks than 500MHz, that’s still under development.

We have to say that X1 could be also read as eleven following the previous ATI´s naming/numbering nomenclature. Radeon 7000, 8000, 9x00, X (X – number ten in the Latin alphabet) and now X1 as eleven.

ATI is truly the Canadian Cabalist.

ATI will introduce the X1600 generation with X1300 cards in the first week of October together with its flagship R520, Radeon X1800 generation. µ

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26108

**Radeon X1800XT and Pro will be 512MB cards **

ATI DECIDED to put some additional pressure on Nvidia’s 7800GTX. Its soon to be released card will feature 512MB of memory. This memory is not such a big deal but in the eyes of consumers means the world to them. We confirmed that two flagship Radeons X1800XT and X1800PRO will come as 512MB cards.
The Radeon X1800 XL will be more affordable 256 MB card but less memory means a lower price, of course. Nvidia will have to respond with a 512MB version of Geforce 7800GTX and we suspect that the green company from California plans to drop the prices of its 256MB models at the same time.

ATI is using some fast memory this time and as you could imagine 512MB of memory clocked at 1400 or 1250MHz might be an expensive piece of architecture.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26106

[Aces170]

SOme more additional news :

AnandTech Forums: Technology, Hardware, Software, and Deals

ATI Radeon X1800 (R520)

* Radeon X1800 XT Crossfire Edition

* Radeon X1800 XT

* Radeon X1800 XL

* Radeon X1800 Pro

The 90nm R520 components will come in three flavors as we mentioned earlier, all with the X1800 Radeon moniker. The available marketing information claims that the GPU uses an “ultra-threaded quad-core 3D architecture” and a “512-bit ring bus” memory controller. There’s definitely some marketing hyperbole going on there, but let’s get into the details.

Those of you who know a little bit about GPU architecture should recognize the “ultra-threaded quad-core” design as a standard GPU. X800XL/XT would also qualify as ultra-threaded and quad-core, as would the 6800GT/Ultra. They have a core split up into groups of “quads” - four pixel pipelines that can be deactivated as a group in case one of them is faulty. Our understanding from the documentation is that there are once again four quads, so expect to see 16 pipes on this card. There are some “confirmations” of 24pp and 32pp, but the roadmaps clearly say four cores/quads (at least to begin with) due to yeild. All signs indicate that a future generation, R580, will use six cores instead.

The 512-bit internal ring bus actually excites us the most; Cell’s Elemental Interface Bus (EIB) uses a 16-byte wide quad ring bus, capable of transferring 16-bytes per cycle to the various SPEs. R520’s ring bus would actually be four times wider than the bus found on Cell; though this implementation is in R520’s memory controller rather than the PPE-to-SPE interface. With all the hype for R520 so far, everyone is banking on the memory controller to put X1800 ahead of G70. However, there is once again some hype occurring. The memory subsystem is still connected by a more typical 256-bit memory bus, and the 512-bit ring bus is something else. We’ll have to wait for actual cards and benchmarks before we can really discover how the card performs.

Other interesting technologies on R520 include Shader Model 3.0 (and thus HDR), Adaptive anti-aliasing, and up to 512MB of GDDR3 memory. Our sources indicate that only the Crossfire versions of X1800 will support 512MB initially, but this may change further downstream. Radeon X1800, X1600 will also feature ATI’s AvivoTM technology, which we currently cannot discuss further. There was also indiciation in the roadmap that this generation of ATI cards will fully support Windows Vista, with beta drivers already available.

Radeon X1600 (RV530)

* Radeon X1600 XT Crossfire Edition

* Radeon X1600 XT

* Radeon X1600 Pro

X1600 is very similar to X1800 with respect to features, although there will be different clocks and pipelines. The roadmap lists a 256-bit internal ring bus, whereas the X1800 models will have a 512-bit bus instead. The external memory bus will be half as wide as well: 128-bits vs. 256-bits. Obviously, with fewer quads the need for a wider bus is diminished, and the X1600 only has three quads (12 pipes). To our knowledge, everything from RV530 and lower is virtually identical to the roadmap we published a few weeks ago, with a few of the launch dates pushed back.

Radeon X1300 (RV515)

* Radeon X1300 Pro

* Radeon X1300

* Radeon X1300 HyperMemory

Our original roadmap from just a few weeks ago claimed an “LE” version of RV515, but it appears this has been replaced with just an RV515 “vanilla” offering instead. Since then, we have also gotten wind of a HyperMemory card. If priced right, a high performance HyperMemory card from ATI could really give NVIDIA a run for their money on the low end; NVIDIA’s GeForce 6500 is the upcoming TurboCache replacement. The roadmaps also indicated Crossfire on X1300, but so far there are no Master Cards slated for RV515.

Several of ATI’s AIB partners told us that there will be no Radeon X800GTO2 recently. There might be an exclusive deal lined up for a specific AIB, but all signs seem to indicate that X800GTO and X800GT are the short term products that are supposed to replace X800XL, and that inventory of the 90nm components should be widely available before the EOL of X800GTO.

[bottle]

looks like the details are coming in.. making this thread a temporary sticky till some other new product releases

[Aces170]

Hmm am not yet clear about the signifcance of the 512 bit ring bus…

[Rahul]

is it true …

The Radeon X1800 XL will be more affordable 256 MB card but less memory means a lower price, of course. Nvidia will have to respond with a 512MB version of Geforce 7800GTX and** we suspect that the green company from California plans to drop the prices of its 256MB models at the same time**.

[Rahul]

some more news …

Brands of ATI’s new graphic chips leaked, Crossfire boards to cost more than $200

ATI to match Nvidia’s GeForce 7800 volume launch - almost

EDIT:- 500th post …

[Aces170]

LOL About Nvidia reduce its prices, they havent reduced the prices of its cards since a long time. X800XL is available for 250$ in both AGP as well as PCIE editions, same should be the case for 6800 GT too. 6800 ultra should also reduce its price since now 7800 GT is cheaper then it.

[Aditya]

Hope they arent overly priced.
I heard the r520XT beats the 7800 GTX by 1000 points in 3DMark05 !_!. Yikes!

Hope their Supplies last . Wait a min. what am i saying, it wont .
Every1 will be forced to buy a 7800 GTX coz of unavailability of the x1800’s .
(Atleast thats what nVidia hopes .)

Seriously speaking, i see another 7800 card out there soon.

[Rahul]

golden frag just click on the links i have posted above … this time ATi is doin something about availability …

[bottle]

goldenfrag please edit your posts to add anything extra instead of posting multiple times after the other

[Rahul]

hey goldenfreg just chk out the links posted by me … ATi is gonna do something about the availability of the cards …

[Aditya]

Hmm, sorry bottle,

hmm, Toms hardware states that they are available at “HIGH” volume, i doubt it..

[Aces170]

Well its mentioned somewhere initially they are just gone produce 1000 R520’s initially they are facing yield issues.

[Blade_Runner]

We got hold of some performance figures of the Radeon X1800 XL and using the beta Catalyst 8.172 drivers, it outperforms the Radeon X850 XT PE slightly. For 3DMark05, you are probably looking at a close 7K. However, the beta drivers still aren’t looking too good at the moment and ATi is working hard to get their drivers ready and optimized for the launch.

http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=2679&s=1

This looks like a sweet deal

[Aces170]

Hmm I am not too aware of the 7800GT’s performance, if I am not wrong it should compete sweetly with 7800 GT and at 300$ thats gonna be a sweet competion…

[Aditya]

Dunno if this is posted.

T TURNS out that ATI will end up with at least four versions of cards based on the X1800-R520 core. We talked about X1800 XT, PRO and XL here and we finally managed to confirm some details about Radeon X1800 LE.

This card will be the cheapest version of the R520 core on the market and will be there to fight 6800 LE cards. The Radeon X1800 LE will be twelve pipelines part while its core will work at 450MHz.

The card will use memory working at 900MHz and we hope that ATI won’t price this card too high. Boards should arrive at the same time as all the R520 cards but will be available as it’s not problem to make volumes of this quite reasonably clocked chip.

We believe that this card will find many supporters in the OEM and SI market and we don’t think that ATI will be so keen to have this card in retail but this might eventually happen. µ

Source

[undertaker]

Waiting eagerly till then…

[Chaos]

From Anandtech…

AnandTech Forums: Technology, Hardware, Software, and Deals

Card Pipes Std Core Clock Std Memory MSRP
X1800 XT 16 600MHz 700MHz 512MB GDDR3 $599
X1800 XL 16 550MHz 625MHz 512MB GDDR3 $499
X1800 Pro 16 500MHz 500MHz 256MB GDDR3 $449
X1800 LE 12 450MHz 450MHZ 256MB GDDR3 $349

Common features to all R520 based boards include the new 90nm lead free manufacturing process, a Xilleon based TV encoder, SM3.0, H.264 decode acceleration and CrossFire support. Also expect to see HDTV options for all 90nm ATI cards in the near future, although they may be limited to the All In Wonder series for R520.

At the top end is the Radeon X1800 XT; this 16-pipe R520 will feature a 600MHz core clock, with a 256-bit memory bus connected to 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 700MHz. The 600MHz core clock will give it a lower fill rate than the GeForce 7800 GTX (24-pipes at 430MHz), while the 700MHz memory clock will give it more memory bandwidth than the stock GTX (600MHz). Much like the GTX, the X1800 XT will be priced at $599. The X1800 XT will feature two DVI outputs with HDCP support. The lower fillrate seems alarming at first, but consider several factors. First of all, ATI’s traditional core design can do “more” per clock cycle (at least on the R420 design) than NVIDIA. Secondly, R520 has a lot of little tweaks including hardware asissted H.264 decoding. Just last week, we also received details about ATI’s revamped memory controller which operates on an internal 512-bit ring bus. There is a lot to speculate about performance, but even with similar fill rates as NVIDIA, there is a strong possibility that other workings in R520 will differentiate the card on a real world performance level.

Next up is the Radeon X1800 XL, which is positioned between the GeForce 7800 GTX and the 7800 GT. The XL drops the core clock down to 550MHz, and the memory clock down to 625MHz. Other than the lower clock speeds, the XL is identical to the XT, meaning it still has 512MB of GDDR3 memory connected to a 256-bit memory bus. The X1800 XL will be priced at $499. Both the X1800 XT and X1800 XL appear to be dual-slot designs from previous roadmaps and existing box art. The roadmap also details that there will be HDCP support for the X1800 XL and X1800 XT via Texas Instrument’s TFP513PAP DVI transmitter.

Priced at $449, we have the X1800 Pro, once more a 16-pipe R520 design but this time the core runs at 500MHz. The Radeon X1800 Pro only has 256MB of memory, also running at 500MHz, but still retains the same 256-bit memory bus. What is interesting about the Radeon X1800 Pro is that its fill rate and memory bandwidth appear to be identical to that of NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800GT; coincidentally, so does its price. The reference design for the X1800 Pro features a single VGA and a single DVI connector, with no HDCP support.

The last member of the R520 family is the Radeon X1800 LE, which disables four of the pipelines of the R520 taking it down to a 12-pipe design. The LE runs at 450MHz with 256MB of 450MHz GDDR3 memory. Once again we’re dealing with a 256-bit memory bus, and this time a $349 price tag. The outputs are identical to the X1800 Pro. Both the Pro and LE cards are single slot cooling design, thanks to their lower running clock speeds.

[Rahul]

was about to post that chaos … u r fast … anyways i think ATi is again screwing things up … i willll be happy with 24pipes rather than 512MB of ram …

[Blade_Runner]

^^ LOL even more pipelines = better performance criteria is out of the window from now on.

@Hardocp

We know many people get caught up in pipeline counts debate lately. The GeForce 7800 GTX does have 24 pixel pipelines and 16 ROPs, while the GeForce 7800 GT has 20 pixel pipelines. We are starting to move into a time now however where pipeline count really isn’t as important as a performance indicator as it used to be. In the past, you could simply look at the fillrate and guess the performance. With video cards today, I think we need to start moving beyond this kind of thinking and not get so caught up in the details that may sway our purchasing decisions. Definitions and architectures are changing; how a pipeline is defined is changing; and how performance is derived from fillrate is changing. We should simply look at the game play performance and image quality delivered by each card and make an informed purchase decision based on that criteria.