Computex`2004: Mobo Foxconn
Video cards is the most perishable stuff in the system.
Their generations are flickering past so quickly that you even can't get used to them and get bored. Those were really fabulous times when the "Ti" line ruled the whole world..But one morning the ATI gang knocked up and brought us the young Radeon9700Pro cutie-beauty for breakfast.. Then for lunch - a gangbang with NV35/38 lady butterflies and R350/360 monsters. Completely exhausted by the evening, the consumer anyway indulges with the NV40 mermaid (nicknamed GeForce 6800) waving her tail and striving to kick out your jaw if things go wrong.. Then - R420 (Radeon X800, or simply call her "Ruby")...
"Did you order more girls? Here they are."
Ugh! Bugged to death!! Each of them wants $500 in cash and now, seducing us with their unexampled voluptuous shapes made with version 2 pixel shaders and splendid hair with version 3, plus the "untiring performance". Can one really resist the temptation? No! So, you pin all the butterflies on the needle and hang them on the wall to join those rejected and deserted. For the coming six months to one year - only lady spies and mermaids in your heart, with financial disaster in your wallet.
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| NVIDIA's mermaids |
ATI's Ruby |
Ladies wouldn't have been the way they are if they first don't drive us crazy. At that, you've got to go through the "we aren't like them - we are different" procedure. They urge you for a strip-tease show called "presentation", otherwise no one can tear us - lazy guys - away from the computer. Presidents, vice-presidents, marketing directors walk along the podium, showering praise upon the goods in every possible way - as it should be. The cuties are still behind the scenes - not yet ready. One of them is so swelled that even can't fit into any dress and is carrying a mini power station behind. The other is always annoyed about the ever falling make-up. By the end of the show, the sacred phrase "will be available in two weeks.." is pronounced, with the spectators slowly drifting apart over to bars, gulping the saliva, moaning with lust, wiping male tears from the forehead.. Every spectator is duped, carrying a pound of strings on the ears.
We know it quite well - there are as few top-notch chips as really beautiful ladies. So few that they can't be quickly produced in quantities enough to emulate their abundance on the market and small shops. See something flicker in the distance? - that's all.. enjoy having seen it out of the corner of your eye and be happy! But if you happen to get the privilege of the first touch, legends and sagas of that memorable day will be passed over to your grandchildren, exciting their minds.
The creators are easy to understand - the chip is there, as many as eight first live chips brought from the factory by a special flight in a panzer handbag, and the cards built on the chips simply started easily for some reason. That's a success, isn't it? So many years of hard work, the awful lot of money spent, so much bitter resentment gulped, so many meetings held in all the rooms at headquarters, so many vain hopes in that this time YOUR COMPETITOR WILL BE PROSTRATED. That's a magic feeling :) We did it - but they are still sweating.
ATI PCI-Ex launchIn fact, all are and will be "sweating". That's a dreadful industry. It is a permanent ever-lasting race while looking over your shoulder - what are they up to now this time? NVIDIA once got the bitter surprise of Radeon9700Pro, so this is unlikely to repeat again. Nowadays, all the competing parties use informers in the rival camps who are not rank and file at all. The risk of being caught is very high, but the game is worth the candles. Do you mean to say it's bad? Nope.. It is like blaming and reproaching governments for having own intelligence services. They've had and will have them.
Since the announced prices are the same, the only what the buyer is concerned about is "which is faster this time?" None is the fastest - NV40 and R420 are worth one another at performance and about twice as fast than their previous incarnations. You shouldn't have expected something different - they were to stand on par, the way it should be. All these declarations of new image quality technologies is pure marketing, by and large. Even this time, nothing revolutionary has been presented. In its arsenal ATI has a new normal map compression algorithm (for details, look here), and NVIDIA offers support for version 3.0 pixel shaders. That's fine.. what else to say? Let's live with it and see - maybe something takes root. The GDDR3 is curious indeed.
And the most exciting part comes. The performance is approximately the same, so are the street prices. So, who is the winner? The winner is the party which SELLS more and whose production prime costs are LOWER. Guess whose chips and whose cards are cheaper :-)
PowerColor
On the very first day of the expo, ATI officially announced a launch of their PCI-Ex products. Why wait if cards are there on the stands of its partners?
| PowerColor X600 PCI-Ex |
PowerColor X300 PCI-Ex |
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| 400/300 (Core/Mem)128/256Mb128Bit Mem4 pipelines |
325/200 (Core/Mem)128/256Mb128Bit Mem4 pipelines |
ATI's X600 and X300 differ in the frequencies only. No more differences. I must admit it is strange - we thought if X800XT offered 16 pipelines, and X800Pro - 12, then we expected X600 to have 8, and 4 in X300. All turned out to be different.
Even more, we expected that the screening after manufacture of X800 would be used in the X600 series, but no - they are different chips. Let it be that way, but then X600 and X300 sure should be of a unified chip differing in the frequencies only. X300 proved to be a standalone project; even more than that - the industry's first product manufactured using the 0.11 mk process technology:
ATI first introduced the 0.13 mk process with the mainstream Radeon9600, and transition to the 0.11 was made for the lower-ends. That makes sense - X300 is much cheaper to produce, the number of chips to use is going to be very(!) high (Intel is full of confidence in migrating us all to new platforms in no time), because transition to new process technologies gives a 20% gain in the wafer area with greater chip yield. All seems to be logical enough.
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