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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
116 Comments
View All Comments
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!