News GDDR5 for AMD’s next-gen graphics chip is shipping

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/05/21/gddr5-for-amd-s-next-gen-graphics-chip-is-shipping/1

Qimonda confirms it has started shipping GDDR5 memory for AMD’s next-generation "R700" family of graphics processors.

 

What ever happened to GDDR4? Too expensive?

I think AMD need a rework of their lineup before they'll be able to compete at the very top-end on single-card solutions with nVidia again, although the 3870 X2 was pretty interesting.

 

Will be interested to see what (if any) improvements are shown in multi-gpu setups, as crossfire has potential but it is frustratingly inconsistent at present.

 

Cool, I plan on getting one of AMD's new graphics cards, though I am always a bit sceptical if its just higher clock frequencies and not much change of the architecture of the gpu.

 

Thats what they are doing though,

except that it looks like they wont bother fighting for the top card spot anymore.

 

The future is RED!!
Crossfire is being supported both by AMD and Intel apparently. And based on the fact that still Nvidia hasn't obtain licence for the next Intel series of processors, it doesn't matter how powerfull single GPU ATI can make as long is good enough and cheap to produce.

As long as they can plug 3-4 GPU in one card and wire more than one of them on the motherboards (all Intel chipsets support xfire, along with ATI ones), the competition hasn't any reply other than follow (difficult since SLI is tricky especialy when it's not supported by the motherboards) or spend all their money to develop single chip solutions.

Don't forget. Crossfire technology supported 32-way connectivity from day one. SLI is strill struggling to make 3 cards work.

I would like to see those 4x PCI-e motherboards, with 4 3870X2 on.

 

didnt i hear somewhere that they were going to let both GPUs access the same memory pool?
IE instead of having 512mb for each gpu it would be 1gig spread across both

 

Well I am certainly looking forward to this. ^_^

 

Fixed. Brute force computing is a bad way of solving problems.

Too bad it doesn't provide many tangible benefits, and it certainly isn't justifiable considering price. (Neither is 3-way SLI, of course)

 

Seriously, What the flood ever happened to GDDR4?

 

It will be interesting to see how things develop. The change in ATI's approach mirrors what happened in the CPU arena - a change from trying to pump out high amounts of megahertz to instead focusing on efficiency across many CPUs with more moderate brute force ability. As the demands of GPUs and current graphical technology (as far as regular people go) handle multi-GPUs differently than how programs can use multi-CPUs, I can see the change in approach only working if they succeed at more than just a hardware level. Not just good drivers but -great- drivers and the ability to seamlessly use many GPUs as easily as one uses many CPUs in implementation and usage (for developers and consumers).