r520 tapes out
 

http://www.theinquirer.net./?article=24540

Not exactly the most reliable site on the net, but if true the cards probably a matter of weeks away.

"taping out" basically means that the core is finalised, theyre getting an acceptable amount of working cores per wafer and will be going into mass production soon.

This is a wafer

[img]http://www.intel.com/pressroom/images/processors/p4_13micron_wafer.jpg[/img]

Each one of those little squares is a pentium 4 core. For graphics cores its the same deal, not all of them will end up working, usually the ones on the edges will have some defects. Up untill now ati was only getting around 20% of those cores on a wafer to work, apparrently now because of the chip being respun the pecentage has dramitically increased. r520 soon kids. biggrin:

lol


So the R520 core is finished... for the 3rd time. You honestly think ATI can step up and produce enough of these magic cores, that until recently they were having numerous problems with, to send the manufactures to mass produce the final card and get them out in a couple weeks.

If ATI even gets them about before Christmas I'll take my 6800GT into the street and beat it like a hooker then go out and buy a R520 no matter the price/performance.

This is ATI's first time making a graphics core... I hope they can pull it off successfully.

Well the x800 series was plagued by crap yields which hampered availability. The r520 core has been up and running for a while now (since before e3) they had some of them at e3 as well. The whole reason the cards not been available was because of poor yields and obviously ati didn't want a repeat of the x800xt-pe fiasco so they held back and waited untill the 90 nanometre process was giving them an acceptable amount of cores per wafer.

Hows this ati's first time maiking a core btw? The original radeon was ati designed as was the 8500. The r300 core was designed by a team from artx which was bought by ati but its still an ati core seeing as theyve been integrated into ati. The 8500 core has basically lasted untill the x850 series. Far as i know its basically the same design with extra pipelines bolted onto it and the core shrunk in size over time.

I'm fairly positive that there were no R520s at E3. That would have been huge news. The only thing they had there were the Crossfire cards.

That's exactly why this is ATI's first core. ArtX designed the first one and ATI bought it/them. R520 is a supposedly completely new core started from stratch. Add in the fact that moving to 90nm fab is VERY hard. Both AMD and Intel had a very hard time getting there from 130nm. This will also be ATI's first card to use full fp32 instead of fp24. They are packing too much stuff into this tiny new core: 32 pipes, fp16 HDR with AA, and SM3.0. All on a brand new process that they aren't familiar with... Recipe for disaster, IMO.

Get a room you 2.

[img]http://www.hydrogenelf.com/boards/images/smiles/icon_profileleft.gif[/img]

[img]http://thiswebsiterules.com/images/smiles/262.gif[/img]

So let me get this straight ....

a core is on a mobo like Nvidia chipsets or is it on a video card?

Well one of the pics i seen form e3 showed a windowed pc case with a very long looking ati card in with a dual slot cooler, looked like an x850 cooler but the card seemed to be longer than ab x850. Some news sites were saying it was an early r520 card.

The r520 could be a recipe for disaster but given the specs its gonna smack around anything out there at the minute, first 90 nanometre card, only card on the market with 32 pipes, only 600mhz core on the market. Even if it came out at 24 pipes it would still outperform a gtx because of its faster core speed.

We'll know soon enough anyway, if they can duplicate the 7800gtx release it should be interesting to see what nvidia can come up with to compete with it, because its gonna take an sli setup to compete with a single r520, and much more than that to compete with crossfired r520's.

A core is on video cards, or on cpu's. Can't compare gpu's to cpu's or motherboard chipsets as the design is totally different.

dont trust the inquirer gerv... i would even think you would know about that know... they post so much shit... its like the internet tabloid oOo:

Exactly why i said "not the most reliable site on the net". They usually are fulla mad dogs shite but they occasionally get it right.

I kinda think of them as a tease... example for if you want specific specs ... they`ll make it up to your expectations... but.....

Inq has actually been on a long streak of semi-solid info...

Always take it with a grain of salt though.