The RV870 Story: AMD Showing up to the Fight
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 14, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Adjusting Trajectory & Slipping Schedule
Carrell didn’t believe in building big chips anymore. It wasn’t that it was too difficult, it’s that it took too long for a $600 GPU to turn into a $200 GPU. AMD believed that the most important market was the larger (both in quantity and revenue) performance mainstream segment.
Rather than making the $200 - $300 market wait for new technology, Carrell wanted to deliver it there first and then scale up/down to later address more expensive/cheaper markets.
The risk in RV770 was architecture and memory technology. The risk in RV870 was architecture and manufacturing process, the latter which was completely out of AMD’s control.
Early on Carrell believed that TSMC’s 40nm wasn’t mature enough and that when it was ready, its cost was going to be much higher than expected. While he didn’t elaborate on this at the time, Carrell told me that there was a lot of information tuning that made TSMC’s 40nm look cheaper than it ended up being. I'll touch on this more later on in the article.
Carrell reluctantly went along with the desire to build a 400+ mm2 RV870 because he believed that when engineering wakes up and realizes that this isn’t going to be cheap, they’d be having another discussion.
In early 2008, going into Februrary, TSMC started dropping hints that ATI might not want to be so aggressive on what they think 40nm is going to cost. ATI’s costs might have been, at the time, a little optimistic.
Engineering came back and said that RV870 was going to be pretty expensive and suggested looking at the configuration a second time.
Which is exactly what they did.
The team met and stuck with Rick Bergman’s compromise: the GPU had to be at least 2x RV770, but the die size had to come down. ATI changed the configuration for Cypress (high end, single GPU RV870) in March of 2008.
And here’s where the new ATI really showed itself. We had a company that had decided to both 1) not let schedule slip, and 2) stop designing the biggest GPU possible. Yet in order to preserve the second belief, it had to sacrifice the first.
You have to understand, changing a chip configuration that late in the game, 1.5 years before launch, screws everything up. By the time RV770 came out, 870 was set in stone. Any changes even a year prior to that resets a lot of clocks. You have to go back and redo floorplan and configuration, there’s a lot of adjusting that happens. It takes at least a couple of weeks, sometimes a couple of months. It impacted schedule. And ATI had to work extremely hard to minimize that where possible. The Radeon HD 5870 was around 30 - 45 days late because of this change.
Remember ATI’s nothing-messes-with-schedule policy? It took a lot of guts on the part of the engineering team and Rick Bergman to accept a month+ hit on redesigning RV870. If you don’t show up to the fight, you lose by default, and that’s exactly what ATI was risking by agreeing to a redesign of Cypress.
This is also super important to understand, because it implies that at some point, NVIDIA made a conscious decision to be late with Fermi. ATI wasn’t the only one to know when DX11/Windows 7 were coming. NVIDIA was well aware and prioritized features that delayed Fermi rather than align with this market bulge. GPUs don’t get delayed without forewarning. AMD risked being late in order to make a smaller chip, NVIDIA risked being late to make a bigger one. These two companies are diverging.
The actual RV870
Engineering was scrambling. RV870 had to be a lot smaller yet still deliver 2x the computational power of RV770. Features had to go.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
132 Comments
View All Comments
Dudler - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - link
Your reasoning is wrong. The 57xx is a performance segment down from the 48xx segment. By your reasoning the 5450 should be quicker than the last gen 4870X2. The 5870 should be compared to the 4870, the 5850 to 4850 and so on.Regarding price, the article sure covers it, the 40nm process was more expensive than TSMC told Amd, and the yield problems factored in too. Can't blame Amd for that can we?
And finally, don't count out that Fermi is absent to the party. Amd can charge higher prices when there is no competition. At the moment, the 5-series has a more or less monopoly in the market. Considering this, I find their prices quite fair. Don't forget nVidia launched their Gtx280 at $637....
JimmiG - Friday, February 19, 2010 - link
"Your reasoning is wrong. The 57xx is a performance segment down from the 48xx segment. "Well I compared the cards across generations based on price both at launch and how the price developed over time. The 5850 and 4850 are not in the same price segment of their respective generation. The 4850 launched at $199, the 5850 at $259 but quickly climbed to $299.
The 5770 launched at $159 and is now at $169, which is about the same as a 1GB 4870, which will perform better in DX9 and DX10. Model numbers are arbitrary and at the very best only useful for comparing cards within the same generation.
The 5k-series provide a lot of things, but certainly not value. This is the generation to skip unless you badly want to be the first to get DX11 or you're running a really old GPU.
just4U - Tuesday, February 16, 2010 - link
and they are still selling the 275,285 etc for a hefty chunk of change. I've often considered purchasing one but the price has never been right and mail in rebates are a "PASS" or "NO THANKS" for many of us rather then a incentive.I haven't seen the mail-ins for AMD products much I hope their reading this and shy away from that sort of sales format. To many of us get the shaft and never recieve our rebates anyway.
BelardA - Monday, February 15, 2010 - link
Also remind people... the current GTX 285 is about $400 and usually slower than the $300 5850. So ATI is NOT riping off people with their new DX11 products. And looking at the die-size drawings, the RV870 is a bit smaller than the GT200... and we all now that FERMI is going to be another HUGE chip.The only disappointment is that the 5750 & 5770 are not faster than the 4850/70 which used to cost about $100~120 when inventory was good. Considering that the 5700 series GPUs are smaller... Hell, even the 4770 is faster than the 5670 and costs less. Hopefully this is just the cost of production.
But I think once the 5670 is down to $80~90 and the 5700s are $100~125 - they will be more popular.
coldpower27 - Monday, February 15, 2010 - link
nVidia made a conscious decision, not to fight the 5800 Series, with the GTX 200 in terms of a price war. Hence why their price remain poor value. They won't win using a large Gt200b die vs the 5800 smaller die.Another note to keep in mind is that the 5700 Series, also have the detriment of being higher in price due to ATi moving the pricing scale backup a bit with the 5800 Series.
I guess a card that draws much less power then the 4800's, and is close to the performance of those cards is a decent win, just not completely amazing.
MonkeyPaw - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - link
Actually, the 4770 series was meant to be a suitable performance replacement for the 3870. By that scheme, the 5770 should have been comperable to the 4870. I think we just hit some diminishing returns from the 128bit GDDR5 bus.nafhan - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - link
It's the shaders not the buswidth. Bandwidth is bandwidth however you accomplish it. The rv8xx shaders are slightly less powerful on one to one basis than the rv7xx shaders are.LtGoonRush - Sunday, February 14, 2010 - link
The point is that an R5770 has 128-bit GDDR5, compared to an R4870's 256-bit GDDR5. Memory clock speeds can't scale to make up the difference from cutting the memory bus in half, so overall the card is slower, even though it has higher compute performance on the GPU. The GPU just isn't getting data from the memory fast enough.Targon - Monday, February 15, 2010 - link
But you still have the issue of the 4870 being the high end from its generation, and trying to compare it to a mid-range card in the current generation. It generally takes more than one generation before the mid range of the new generation is able to beat the high end cards from a previous generation in terms of overall performance.At this point, I think the 5830 is what competes with the 4870, or is it the 4890? In either case, it will take until the 6000 or 7000 series before we see a $100 card able to beat a 4890.
coldpower27 - Monday, February 15, 2010 - link
Yeah we haven't seen ATi/nVidia achieved the current gen mainstream faster then the last gen high end. Bandwidth issues are finally becoming apparent.6600 GT > 5950 Ultra.
7600 GT > 6800 Ultra.
But the 8600 GTS, was only marginally faster then the 7600 GT and nowhere near 7900 GTX, it took the 8800 GTS 640 to beat the 7900 GTX completely, and the 800 GTS 320 beat it, in the large majority of scenarios, due to frame buffer limitation.
The 4770 slots somewhere between the 4830/4850. However, that card was way later then most of the 4000 series. Making it a decent bit faster then the 3870, which made more sense since the jump from 3870 to 4870 was huge, sometimes nearly even 2.5x could be seen nearly, given the right conditions.
4670 was the mainstream variant and it was, most of the performance of the 3800 Series, it doesn't beat it though, more like trades blows or is slower in general.