The Last Of The Big GPU's

Winga

ATI's R600 may be the last its breed, the monolithic GPU.

These will be replaced by a cluster of smaller GPUs with the R700 generation.
Basically the architecture of any modern GPU, R5xx/6xx or G80, is comprised of modular units connected by a big interconnector. Imagine if this interconnector was more distributed. You could have four small chips instead of one big one.

It would take a fair bit of software to make it work, but word is ATI has figured it out. This effectively means R700 boards will be more modular, more scalable, more consistent and far cheaper to produce. In fact when launching one model, they will have the capability to launch them all.

This would have massive advantages on design time, you need to make a chip of quarter the size or less, and just place many of them on the PCB. If you want a low-end board, use one, mid-range use four, pimped out edition, 16. You get the idea, Lego.

Hopefully this will put an end to their power hungry requirements as well

Source: The Inquirer

Garg

Wonder if this will help with processor yeilds, too?

shwaip

oh yes. Assuming you get 100 "big" gpus from a wafer, if a core takes up 1% of a wafer, and a defect breaks it, your yield is down to 99%, with only one defect. If you have 4 cores that are 4x smaller, your yield is only down to 99.75% with that same defect.

This also doesn't include any possible increases you get from being able to use more of the wafer.

Garg

So I guess the question remains - even if this allows cards to be made for cheaper, how much cheaper will they actually sell for? People (although not me) are used to $500 and $600 cards, now.

shwaip

I wouldn't expect prices to drop...people will probably pay for the cool factor of having the multi-core processor.

TheSmJ

I thought GPUs were going to be replaced by multi-core CPUs anyways.

ins4n17y

thats not a good thing i mean will it affect us hardware hackers? on a single chip design we are able to unlock the pipelines or so or by doing a bios flash....but if it scales like lego i mean these future products, um does that mean us hardware tweakers are doomed?

Thrax

Probably, but there hasn't been a suitably-hackable video card in a long time (Relative to the speed at which PCs advance).

muddocktor

With this latest generation of power hungry, hot running gpu's that Nvidia has developed along with the R600 that ATI/AMD is presently trying to finish up on, I was wondering when the gpu manufacturers would realize that they were running into the same brick wall that the cpu manufacturers ran into. I figured that they would work on some way to modularize their gpu efforts in order to get better yields and maybe also address the power usage of their future video cards.

ins4n17y

muddocktor wrote:

With this latest generation of power hungry, hot running gpu's that Nvidia has developed along with the R600 that ATI/AMD is presently trying to finish up on, I was wondering when the gpu manufacturers would realize that they were running into the same brick wall that the cpu manufacturers ran into. I figured that they would work on some way to modularize their gpu efforts in order to get better yields and maybe also address the power usage of their future video cards.

according to the inquirer: "Thermal specs for G85, R680 and R700 aren't yet available, but we got information that the thermal budget is 225W for at least a year. We also learned that at least one of the big two is preparing a complete power distribution revamp on the PCB and getting efficiency as close to 100% as possible." see here: http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35768 it's already in the works.