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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VaultDweller - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I wish you had gotten greedy! I want to know about RV870, and about nVidia's first DirectX 11 part too.I had been thinking about building a new gaming rig in Q1 2009, but presently it looks like I'd be spending too much for too little improvement over my current box. I'm hoping that changes by late summer. :)
murray13 - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Kudos to you Anand for a G R E A T article!!!And to AMD/ATI for making this possible!
Now if only AMD on the cpu side could do something similar...
jzodda - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
This is one of the best articles I have read here and there have been so many over the years. In the more then 10+ years I have been coming here I have always enjoyed this site and Anand continues to produce great content. Here's to another 10 years!pcfxer - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Not only does anand do engineering, he writes like mad!"Passion has a funny way of being a person’s strongest ally."
prophet001 - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
great article. thank you for writing this :)rqle - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
awesome article, very good read, thankswingless - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Anand, you and all the hard working people at this website have just outdone yourselves. You raised the bar yet again.Your readers are probably as amazed as you are that AMD/ATI came out with such personal and intimate information as to what goes on behind closed doors. Your conclusion is on point as well. Without competition, we know these other companies will run wild with their prices. Unfortunately for us, the fate of competition in both the GPU and CPU market falls on AMD which needs a little financial lovin' right about now.
My strongest desire is that the CPU team over at AMD pulls out all the stops with their next CPU to Bulldoze the competition (or just their prices). We need to make $1000 CPUs a thing of the past. Maybe your site and others can put pressure on AMD to bump up their CPU roadmap about a year so we see Bulldozer in 2010.
Zoomer - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Yup. I have always voted Red with my wallet though! The only two green cards I had were the Riva TNT and the 7600GT. Got rid of that after a couple of months though: it was noisy and the drivers sucked.Radeon DDR 32MB, Radeon 8500, Radeon 9500Pro (Unlocked ;)), Radeon X800XT, Radeon x1950 Pro, and finally the Radeon 4850!
wingless - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I know that is an unrealistic hope. I understand AMD has made it's road map decisions very carefully given their current situation. I can dream though....Bull Dog - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Awesome article Anand. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and I hope for more articles like this in the feature. Many thanks to AMD for letting this happen.