The RV770 Story: Documenting ATI's Road to Success
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 2, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Last Hiccup: Boards Went on Sale Too Soon
The RV770 products were finished in May of 2008, production started by June. Even up until the day that the embargo lifted there were some within ATI who felt they had made a mistake with the smaller-die strategy, but they were going to find out how right the strategy was, even sooner than expected.
The last bump in the road to the Radeon HD 4800 came just a week before launch. We had literally just gotten our first Radeon HD 4850 cards when Chris Hook called and told me that some 4850s had started selling in Europe.
In order to salvage the launch ATI was proposing the following: we could talk about Radeon HD 4850 performance, but we couldn’t talk about the 4870 or the RV770 architecture.
Within 30 hours we had our first preview up and made it already clear that ATI was on to something. The GeForce 9800 GTX got an abrupt price drop to remain competitive and even then it wasn’t enough, the Radeon HD 4850 was the card to get at $199.
The last hiccup in ATI’s launch ended up not being bad at all, ATI got some extra PR, drummed up some added excitement and in the end did justice to a product that deserved it.
Recon from Taiwan
One thing I wondered was how well ATI knew NVIDIA’s plans and vice versa, so I asked the obvious: where do you guys get your information from? The answer was pretty much as expected: Taiwan. All of the board makers know one another and are generally open with sharing information, once information hits Taiwan it’s up for grabs. Then there’s a bit of guesswork that’s done.
ATI planned to put its best foot forward, looking at the roadmaps it seemed like NVIDIA wasn’t going to do much in the G92 space in the time period that ATI would launch RV770. NVIDIA had its sights set on another G80-esque launch with GT200, it would introduce this honkin new chip, price it out of the reach of most and not worry about the peasants until sometime in 2010. The existing product line would be relied on to keep the masses at bay.
ATI was lucky that NVIDIA only had GT200 for the end of 2008 and that NVIDIA’s GT200 performance wasn’t exactly where it needed to be, because it created an opportunity that ATI has only had a couple of times in the past decade.
With the Radeon HD 4850 the initial goal was to make a product that was certainly better than the 8800 GT. It was never a goal for the 4850 to be competitive with the 9800 GTX, after all that was a $300 part and this would sell for $200.
The Radeon HD 4870 was targeted to be faster than the 9800 GTX, which again would make a lot of sense since this was ATI’s $300 part and the GTX was NVIDIA’s. What ATI didn’t expect was for the 4870 to do so well against the GeForce GTX 260. When NVIDIA finally launched the GeForce GTX 280/260 ATI looked at the results and let out a collective “wait a minute”. It worked out perfectly, not only did ATI hit the competitive points it wanted to but thanks to GT200 performance being lower than ATI expected and the RV770 doing better than expected, ATI now had a $300 card that was competitive with NVIDIA’s brand new $400 GTX 260.
For ATI, RV770 was the cake that came out unexpectedly well. Everyone could smell it, and they knew it would be good, but no one expected it to be perfect. NVIDIA responded extremely quickly and honestly no other company would be able to handle such competition so well, but that doesn’t change what ATI was able to accomplish.
These days no one questions Carrell’s thinking about RV770 any longer, everyone agrees that he was right about the strategy. My question is, how long until ATI has to re-evaluate its GPU strategy once more? The first time was in 2001 with R300, again in 2005 with the RV770, which would point to next year as to when some tough decisions may be made again - the results of which we wouldn’t see until 2012/2013.
The next question is how will NVIDIA respond to ATI’s strategy? Jen Hsun runs a very tight ship over there and does not take kindly to losing, especially not like this. NVIDIA continues to have very strong engineering talent and over the next couple of years we’ll see how RV770 has impacted NVIDIA’s development. It’s possible that NVIDIA too realized that the smaller-die strategy made more sense without having been impacted by RV770, perhaps NVIDIA will stick with making huge GPUs, or maybe a third option exists that isn’t as obvious.
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Chainlink - Saturday, December 6, 2008 - link
I've followed Anandtech for many years but never felt the need to respond to posts or reviews. I've always used anandtech as THE source of information for tech reviews and I just wanted to show my appreciation for this article.Following the graphics industry is certainly a challenge, I think I've owned most of the major cards mentioned in this insitful article. But to learn some of the background of why AMD/ATI made some of the decisions they did is just AWESOME.
I've always been AMD for CPU (won a XP1800+ at the Philly zoo!!!) and a mix of the red and green for GPUs. But I'm glad to see AMD back on track in both CPU and GPU especially (I actually have stock in them :/).
Thanks Anand for the best article I've read anywhere, it actually made me sign up to post this!
pyrosity - Saturday, December 6, 2008 - link
Anand & Co., AMD & Co.,Thank you. I'm not too much into following hardware these days but this article was interesting, informative, and insightful. You all have my appreciation for what amounts to a unique, humanizing story that feels like a diamond in the rough (not to say AT is "the rough," but perhaps the sea of reviews, charts, benchmarking--things that are so temporal).
Flyboy27 - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
Amazing that you got to sit down with these folks. Great article. This is why I visit anandtech.com!BenSkywalker - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
Is the ~$550 price point seen on ATi's current high end part evidence of them making their GPUs for the masses? If this entrire strategy is as exceptional as this article makes it out to be, and this was an effort to honestly give high end performance to the masses then why no lengthy conversation of how ATi currently offers, by a hefty margin, the most expensive graphics cards on the market? You even present the slide that demonstrates the key to obtaining the high end was scalability, yet you fail to discuss how their pricing structure is the same one nVidia was using, they simply chose to use two smaller GPUs in the place of one monolithic part. Not saying there is anything wrong with their approach at all- but your implication that it was a choice made around a populist mindset is quite out of place, and by a wide margin. They have the fastest part out, and they are charging a hefty premium for it. Wrong in any way? Absolutely not. An overall approach that has the same impact that nV or 3dfx before them had on consumers? Absolutely. Nothing remotely populist about it.From an engineering angle, it is very interesting how you gloss over the impact that 55nm had for ATi versus nVidia and in turn how this current direction will hold up when they are not dealing with a build process advantage. It also was interesting that quite a bit of time was given to the advantages that ATi's approach had over nV's in terms of costs, yet ATi's margins remain well behind that of nVidia's(not included in the article). All of these factors could have easily been left out of the article altogether and you could have left it as an article about the development of the RV770 from a human interest perspective.
This article could have been a lot better as a straight human interest fluff piece, by half bringing in some elements that are favorable to the direction of the article while leaving out any analysis from an engineering or business perspective from an objective standpoint this reads a lot more like a press release then journalism.
Garson007 - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
Never in the article did it say anything about ATI turning socialistic. All it did mention was that they designed a performance card instead of an enthusiast one. How they approach to finally get to the enthusiast block, and how much it is priced, is completely irrelevant to the fact that they designed a performance card. This also allowed ATI to bring better graphics to lower priced segments because the relative scaling was much less than nVidia -still- has to undertake.The built process was mentioned. It is completely nVidia's prerogative to ignore a certain process until they create the architecture that works on one they already know; you are bringing up a coulda/woulda/shoulda situation around nVidia's strategy - when it means nothing to the current end-user. The future after all, is the future.
I'd respectfully disagree about the journalism statement, as I believe this to be a much higher form of journalism than a lot of what happens on the internet these days.
I'd also disagree with the people who say that AMD is any less secretive or anything. Looking in the article there is no real information in it which could disadvantage them in any way; all this article revealed about AMD is a more human side to the inner workings.
Thank you AMD for making this article possible, hopefully others will follow suit.
travbrad - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
This was a really cool and interesting article, thanks for writing it. :)However there was one glaring flaw I noticed: "The Radeon 8500 wasn’t good at all; there was just no beating NVIDIA’s GeForce4, the Ti 4200 did well in the mainstream market and the Ti 4600 was king of the high end. "
That is a very misleading and flat-out false statement. The Radeon 8500 was launched in October 2001, and the Geforce 4 was launched in April 2002 (that's a 7 month difference). I would certainly hope a card launched more than half a year later was faster.
The Radeon 8500 was up against the Geforce3 when it was launched. It was generally as fast/faster than the similarly priced Ti200, and only a bit slower than the more expensive Ti500. Hardly what I would call "not good at all". Admittedly it wasn't nearly as popular as the Geforce3, but popularity != performance.
7Enigma - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
That's all I have to say. As near to perfection as you can get in an article.hanstollo - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
Hello, I've been visiting your site for about a year now and just wanted to let you know I'm really impressed with all of the work you guys do. Thank you so much for this article as i feel i really learned a whole lot from it. It was well written and kept me engaged. I had never heard of concepts like harvesting and repairability. I had no idea that three years went into designing this GPU. I love keeping up with hardware and really trust and admire your site. Thank you for taking the time to write this article.dvinnen - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
Been reading this site for going on 8 years now and this article ranks up there with your best ever. As I've grown older and games have taken a back seat I find articles like this much more interesting. When a new product comes out I find myself reading the forwards and architectural bits of the articles and skipping over all the graphs to the conclusions.Anyways, just wish I was one of those brilliant programmers who was skilled enough to do massively parallelized programming.
quanta - Friday, December 5, 2008 - link
While the RV770 engineers may not have GDDR5 SDRAM to play with during its development, ATI can already use the GDDR4 SDRAM, which already has the memory bandwidth doubling that of GDDR5 SDRAM, AND it was already used in Radeon X1900 (R580+) cores. If there was any bandwidth superiority over NVIDIA, it was because of NVIDIA's refusal to switch to GDDR4, not lack of technology.