Details are beginning to surface regarding AMD’s first stand alone GPU marchitecture.
The chip location interestingly, is rotated at a 60 degree angle. Notably, this is not the first case of GPU manufacturers rotating the chip on the packaging, however this is done for two good reasons:
Firstly, AMD needed more room for resistors, which are clearly evident around the big die.
Secondly and more important, to shorten the traces to video memory as much as possible, in order to reduce the EM noise produced by the PCB.
When compared to the R580 chip, we note that the R600 die is larger by 15 to 20 percent. Given the fact that the R600 is being manufactured in 80nm, which is a half-node, so called “optical shrink” of 90 nanometres, there is less and less doubt that this baby packs at least half a billion transistors. People forget that the number of metal layers is also increasing, so allowing additional hundred million or so transistors to be packed in.
Industry news sets the R600 launch for January 20th, 2007
Source: The Inquirer
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