reaperrr
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Re:R520 Is 16 or 24 Pipes? - 2005/09/02 22:29
I think ATI's situation is a bit tricky. On the one hand they need to beat not only the GTX reference model, but also those overclocked out-of-the-box variants if they want to sell enough cards. On the other hand they need to keep some room for higher clocks to be able to respond to a possible GeForce 7800 Ultra.
But I find all these rumours about the number of pipes quite confusing, I mean there have been rumours about 16 pipes, 24 pipes, 32 pipes, a 16x2 construction (which is quite possible in my eyes, because if the chip was a plain 32x1 or 24x1, then why has there never been a rumour/speculation about 28 or 20 pipes, just a thought)...
I highly doubt that it is a plain 16x1 chip, because in that case the die should have been a bit smaller, considering the 90nm process, and I can't imagine ATI would be so optimistic to think an increased performance-per-clock and higher clockspeeds are enough to beat a 24-pipe chip. But who knows...me don't. 
Anyway, I personally believe the R580 and not the R520 will be the next big hit from ATI. What's more interesting to me is how the RV530 will perform. A SM 3.0 card with performance similar to the X800XL for less than 200 bucks would be quite interesting. Wonder if it will be the first mainstream 256-bit memory interface chip (not counting crippled ones like Radeon 9500, GeForce 6800/LE, Radeon X800SE/GT and the like)?
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XFX 9800GTX (XT) PCIe 512MB - Rev 01
