The RV770 Story: Documenting ATI's Road to Success
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 2, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
What’s Next?
Much like the R300 days, the success of the RV770 was partially ensured by NVIDIA’s failure. Unlike NV30 however, GT200 wasn’t delayed nor was it terribly underperforming - it was simply overpriced. ATI got very lucky with RV770, NVIDIA was tied up making a huge chip and avoided two major risks: 55nm and GDDR5, both of which ATI capitalized on.
The next round won’t be as easy, NVIDIA will be at 55nm and they’ll eventually transition to GDDR5 as well. ATI can’t pull off another Radeon HD 4800 launch every year, so chances are 2010 will be closer. Even today NVIDIA has managed to close the gap quite a bit by aggressively pricing the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, but there’s still the problem of there not being any mainstream GT200 derivative nor will there be until sometime in 2010. Not to mention the impact of selling a 576mm^2 die at the same price as ATI selling a 260mm^2 die will have on NVIDIA’s financials.
Carrell was very upfront about the follow-on to RV770, he told me frankly that it was impossible to have the perfect product every time. He’d love to, but the reality was that they’re not going to. There are many factors in doing this business that are out of ATI’s (or NVIDIA’s) control, but sometimes the stars align and you get a launch like the Radeon HD 4800 (or the Radeon 9700 Pro).
Carrell did add however that it is possible to, within the limits imposed by those outside factors, ATI can do things that are of compelling value. It’s possible to do the best you can within constraints, and while that may not result in one of these perfect products, it can be something good.
I asked specifically what would made the RV8xx series special all he could tell me was that ATI does have some things that are very interesting, very novel and very useful for the next product. I wanted more but given what Carrell and the rest of ATI had just given me, I wasn’t about to get greedy.
A Little About Larrabee
The big unknown in all of this is Larrabee, Intel’s first fully programmable GPU. Naturally, I talked to Carrell and crew about Larrabee during my final 30 minutes in the room with them.
First we’ve got to get the let’s all be friends speak out of the way. ATI and Intel (and NVIDIA) all agree that data parallelism is incredibly important, it’s the next frontier of compute performance. We don’t exactly know in what form we’ll see data parallel computing used on desktops, but when it happens, it’ll be big. Every single person in that room also expressed the highest respect and regard for ATI’s competitors, that being said, they did have some criticisms.
Like NVIDIA, ATI views the Larrabee approach as a very CPU-like approach to designing a GPU. The challenge from approaching the problem of accelerating data parallel algorithms from the GPU side is to get the programming model to be as easy as it is on the CPU. ATI admitted that Intel does have an advantage given that Larrabee is x86 and the whole environment is familiar to existing developers. ATI believes that it’ll still have the performance advantage (a significant one) but that Larrabee comes out of the gates with a programming advantage.
The thing worth mentioning however is that regardless of who makes the GPU, ATI, NVIDIA or Intel, you still need to rewrite your code to be data parallel. ATI believes that to write efficient parallel code requires a level of skill that’s an order of magnitude higher than what your typical programmer can do. If you can harness the power of a GPU however, you get access to a tremendous amount of power. You get ~1 TFLOP of performance for $170. If you’re a brilliant programmer, you know exactly what you should view as your next frontier...
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MrSpadge - Saturday, December 6, 2008 - link
Exactly what I was thinking! That's why I got a 8500LE back then, when Geforce 4 was not in (public) sight yet.FireSnake - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
... which one is Anand (on the picture at the beginning of the article)?I always wondered how he looks like ... I guess the one on the right.
3DoubleD - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I've had Anandtech as my home page for 5 years and I've read almost every article since (and even some of the older ones). This is by far one of your greatest works!Thanks
hellstrider - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Kudos to Anand for such a great article, extremely insightful. I may even go out and purchase AMD stock now :)I love AMD even when it’s on the bottom, I own 780G + X2 + hd4850, in hopes that Deneb (or AM3 processors for that matter) will come in time to repeat the success of rv770 launch, at which point I will upgrade my obsolete X2 and have a sweet midrange machine.
My only concern is that Nvidia is looking at all this smirking and planning an onslaught with the 55nm refresh. There is a very “disturbing” article at Xbitlabs that Nvidia is stock-piling the 55nm GT200 parts; seems like that’s something they would do – start selling those soon and undercut 4800 series badly.
I’m just a concerned hd4850 owner and I don’t want to see my card obsolete within couple of months. I don’t really see AMD’s answer to 55nm GT200 in such short period of time?!?!
Any thoughts?
Goty - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I don't think you'll have to worry too badly about the 55nm G200s. NVIDIA won't drop prices much, if at all; they're already smarting from the price drops enacted after the RV770 launch. There's also the fact that the 4850 isn't in the same market space as any of the G200 cards, so they're not really competitive anyhow.ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I always imagined designing GPUs would be very stressful given you're trying to guess things years in advance, but this inside look at how things are done was very informative.On GDDR5, it's interesting to read that ATI was pushing so hard for this technology and they felt it was their only hope for the RV770. What about GDDR4? I thought ATI was a big supporter of it too and was the first to implement it. I'm pretty sure Samsung announced GDDR4 that could run at 3.2GBit/s in 2006 which isn't far from the 3.6GBit/s GDDR5 used in the 4870, and 4GBit/s GDDR4 was available in 2007. I guess there are still power savings to be had from GDDR5, but performance-wise I don't think it would have been a huge loss if GDDR5 had been delayed and ATI had to stick with GDDR4.
And another interesting point in your article was definitely about the fate of the 4850. You report that ATI felt that the 4870 was perfectly specced and wasn't changed. I guess that meant they were always targeting the 750MHz core frequency that it launched with. Yet ATI was originally targeting the 4850 at 500MHz clock. With the 4870 being clocked 50% faster, I think it should be obvious to anyone just looking at the clock speed that there would be a huge performance gap between the 4850 and 4870. I believe the X1800XL and X1800XT had a similarly large performance gap. Thankfully Dave Baumann convinced them to clock the 4850 up to a more reasonable 625MHz core.
One thing that I feel was missing from the article was how the AMD acquisition effected the design of the RV770. Perhaps there wasn't much change or the design was already set so AMD couldn't have changed things even if they wanted to, but they must have had an opinion. AMD was probably nervous that they bought ATI at it's height when the R580 was out and top, but once acquired, the R600 came out and underperformed. Would be interesting to know what AMD's initial opinion of ATI's small die, non-top tier targetted strategy was although it now seems to be more consistent with AMD's CPU strategy since they aren't targeting the high-end there anymore either.
hooflung - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
The final frontier market share wise is to steal a major vendor like eVGA. If they can get an eVGA, BFG or XFX to just sell boards with their warranties AMD would be really dominant.JonnyDough - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
The best thing I've ever read on a tech site. This is why you're better than THG.Only one typo! It was a "to" when it should have been a "too."
Chalk one up for the red team. This makes my appreciation for AMD rise even more. Anyone willing to disclose internal perspectives about the market like this is a team with less secrecy that I will support with my hard earned cash. So many companies could stand up and take a lesson here from this (i.e. Apple, MS).
Keep articles like this coming, and I'll keep coming back for more.
Sincerely,
~Ryan
epyon96 - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I have been an avid reader of this site for close to 8 years. I used to read almost every CPU, GPU and novelty gadget articles page to page. But over the years, my patience is much lower and I realize I get just as much enjoyment and information from just reading the first page and last page and skimming a few benchmarks.However, this is the first article in a while that I spent reading all of it and I thoroughly enjoyed it. These little back stories with a human element in one of the most interesting recent launches provides a refreshing change from boring benchmark-oriented articles.
I hope to find an article based on Nehpalem of a similar nature and other Intel launches.
GFC - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Wow, all i can say is that i loved this review. It was realy enjoyable to read, and i must give my thanks to Anandtech and Carrell!