R520 tape-out number three was successful'Fudo' rocks at high speedBy Fuad Abazovic: Tuesday 12 July 2005, 08:40IT TOOK ATI three tape-outs of R520 silicon to make it right but it turned out to be third time lucky.The first R520 silicon worked at high speeds but only few chips worked, we hear. Wafers are expensive and each costs roughly $3000 and if only 20 chips work from your wafer that will make a production costs of that chip enormously big. You need a better number to make more money. We heard those numbers a while back and we believe that this is how much Nvidia or ATI has to pay for each wafer.We wrote about this here and we have to remind you that Jen Hsun of Nvidia told the world that Geforce series, at least one of them, cost Nvidia $400 million to develop. That is serious money but for that money you will get all chips from mobile to desktop and workstation but than again its not that easy to earn $400 million and to make a profit on top, knowing that average sales price of one chip is $27, if I remember correctly.The same business model can be applied to ATI, as both companies are manufacturing its chips at the same TSMC fab.We already said that R520 is to work at more than 600MHz but we believe this number is going to go even higher.We strongly believe that ATI doesn’t have any other choice than to go for a hard launch and, if that happens, you won’t see any Fudo R520s before September. This will give Nvidia a pure lead of two and a half months before ATI reshapes and releases its new cards.Don’t forget that Nvidia has a G70 Ultra up its sleeve, but this is still to come.
ATI's Crossfire to arrive in AugustMulti rendering in actionBy Fuad Abazovic: Wednesday 13 July 2005, 10:34BOARDS ARE getting readied, ATI is working on drivers and trying to produce enough master graphic cards and slowly but surely is getting ready to launch its answer to SLI. Yes it’s almost a year late, but still ATI can offer many things that Nvidia failed to offer with its implementation.Nvidia offers stable drivers that will work in most of the games, is getting toward release 80 drivers and has the fastest SLI platform powered with two 7800GTX cards. Nvidia is catching up on some of the ideas as ATI has introduced some very interesting features and ways of rendering.The key question remains. When will ATI be ready to release its Crossfire platform? Last time we asked some knowledgeable people we got a clear answer that we should see some final motherboards, drivers and graphic cards sometime in August.You may be able to see some beta hardware and drivers before that but as we suggested back in April and May, ATI will first release Crossfire and then will follow up with R520 or should we say with two R520 boards breaking some 3Dmark 05 records.It is taking ATI some time to master its Crossfire platform, motherboards, graphic cards and drivers, but knowing the amount of scepticism in ATI we believe that this platform won't be launched until it irons out all of the known bugs in hardware and in software.SLI is surely getting some competition for late Q3, but choosing a graphic card or multi rendering platform is like a religion. You are either ATI or Nvidia and you won't make the move for nothing. This of course can be applied to mainstream or high end market as those users actually know what are they getting while in low end you are getting the nicer box and better features that you don’t know anything about, mostly.
