The RV770 Story: Documenting ATI's Road to Success
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 2, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
It took Derek and I six thousand, four hundred and sixty one words to review the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870. At this point I’m at 7,788 and all I’ve done is document the gravity of the decision that lead to the RV770.
There’s a lot of work that goes into all of these products we review, both good and bad. These engineers put their life’s work into every last design they complete, both the good ones and the bad ones. To live in the minds of ATI’s engineers as the first R600 reviews were hitting the web is something I would pay anything to avoid.
The life of a chip architect can be quite difficult, to work on something for three years only to have a few poor decisions make it the web’s punching bag is beyond rough. If I screw up a review I can always try to do better next week, if a chip designer contributes to a billion transistor GPU that’s a failure in the market, he/she won’t have another chance to succeed for several months if not a couple of years. I wonder if these chip companies offer counseling as a part of their benefits packages.
There are thousands of stories behind every chip launch, good or bad, most of them never get told. Part of it is that we’re spending so much time praising or berating the product that we rarely have time to offer the backstory. There’s also the issue with most companies being unwilling to disclose information, for any chip company to give me the level of detail that Carrell offered was a big deal, for that chip company to be ATI/AMD is impressive.
We all have these folks to thank, the engineers I met with and the many more that I didn’t. NVIDIA may not have been happiest with the efforts of the RV770 team, but we all benefitted. If you ended up buying a Radeon HD 4800 or derivative, you already know why you’re thankful. If you ended up buying something green, you most likely paid a much lower price than you would have.
It’s often said that competition is good for the market, but rarely do we have such a clear example of it as what happened after the RV770 launch. Cards that used to cost $300 now cost $200, a brand new GPU that was priced at $400 all of the sudden became reasonable at $300. The consumer won; the RV770 team targeted the Performance segment and did a bang up job of addressing its needs.
And it all started because a few guys were willing to shake things up back in 2005.
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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!