R520 is only 16 pipe

uh cause the pipes are bad? I did hear of a rumor saying ati might make the r520xt 20 pipes at the last minute but it looks almost certain this isnt the case and itll only be 16 pipes. I am pretty sure ati will make it impossible to unlock pipes, not that it matters since the very great majority have bad pipes anyway.

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Still wouldn't make sense. If yields are so low that they're locking 4 pipes on EVERY GPU you'd have virtually no chance of a successful unlock anyway. Also, a 20-pipe GPU with yields so bad that all of them need to be crippled wouldn't be cost effective as a 16 pipe GPU either.

Our friends at HKEPC has gotten themselves a R520 card and it will probably be officially known as Radeon X1800 when launch in early October. Interestingly, there are 16, 24 and 32 pipes versions but there are only 10 pieces of the 32 pipes versions exist currently.

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From: http://www.nforcershq.com/article3899.html

is it true about 512bit w/ 32 pipes on R520?

the card is not out yet so no one knows

The Inquirer Article

Funny thing is that a few quarters back Nvidia was so scared of the R520 that it postponed its NV50 project and brought G70, more pipelines version of tweaked NV40 marchitecture and harvested the market with it.

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The 'marchitecture' of that Inquirer article spells speculation to me. As usual with the Inquirer, we have no sources or any informational reference.


16 pipelines... I think the folks in here saying that we will have several binned models of this core, with different pipeline counts (with one or two "hardlocked" bad quads), are on the right track.

Everything we have seen so far indicates that ATi's next gen core yields will be poor. The yields will likely be bottlenecked by nonfunctinal pipelines. The trend of cores with bad pipelines being physically altered, to disable the bad pipelines, so as to be sold in a lower end model, is a trend that we have seen repeatedly used in the past. Look at ATi's X850 XT/XT PE and X800 Pro video cards... the cores on each are identical, but with the lower end model having a disabled pipeline quad, so as to get otherwise useless cores (poor pipeline yield) out into the market and making money for ATi.

The Inquirer is no authority on ATi and their video card cores.

The Coolest said:

You have to remember that this card will have 512bit memory bus. This means double the memory throughput, which ought to add to the cards' performance, especially compared to the GTX's 256bit bus.

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Perhaps, but as mentioned, this isn't confirmed at all. Basically, everything is still all hearsay. If ATi is forced to sell their highend cards with only 16 pipes, then they either have some very poor yields with R520, or the new pipeline has some super-fantabulous design that basically makes the new pipeline = two old pipelines. As I don't have much knowledge of the inner workings of GPUs, I don't know how they would go about this.

I wonder how much benefit a 512bit architecture would help. It's definitely unheard of with gaming cards, although I'm sure some Professional Cad Cards have this feature.