Nvidia cancels nv50!

[RocketArena]

Ifølge dette så blir det ikke noe nv50

 

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20034

 

 

Er litt diskutert her:

 

http://xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=47104

 

Hva mener dere ?

[HKS]

For det første er det bare et rykte, og det er heller ikke sikkert det får noe å si i det heletatt. nVidia har garantert flere design de holder på med, og hvis det orgianale NV50 designet ikke var bra nok kan det hende de bytter det ut med noe helt annet.

 

Ikke noe forskjell på dette, og hva ATi gjorde når de "knaselerte" R400, og gikk for R420 isteden. De hadde et design de så ikke skalerte godt nok, eller var kjapt nok, og valgte å bygge videre på R3x0 kjernen isteden, og lagde da R420 isteden..

 

Tror nok vi garrantert kommer til å se et neste generasjon grafikkort fra nVidia iløpet av 2005.

[MistaPi]

R400 var for over-featured og under-powered for sin tid, men selve designet ble ikke kanselert. Mulig det samme gjelder for NV50.

 

In 2002, the information I heard regarding the NV50 was that it was quite a world away from the NV40. It would have been - at least according to sources - a very different approach to shading.

Let's put it this way: Since the original R400, ATI wanted to unify VS and PS. This most certainly is an interesting feature, but David Kirk - when asked about it in a 2003 interview - said that NVIDIA was, at least for the time being, not interested in such a technology. They estimated that it wasn't worth the trouble, and would cause important difficulties for caching, unless that was radically modified.

But obviously, NVIDIA also needed to improve efficiency somehow. And, from my information... Licensing Fast14 simply was ATI's answer to NVIDIA's projects. A good one at that I'll admit. The basic NVIDIA idea is... yes, I know I already repeated this word a billion times in the past, but... ILDP.

 

The "real' NV50 was much more of a long term project for NVIDIA, just like the "real" R400 in fact. That made each part of the design much more important, at least for NVIDIA; the ALUs - and more importantly their architecture, the way they work together - are expected to be much more polished. Scalability and power efficiency have been considered as of the very first days of the design, because of the NV30 debacle.

From my point of view - and that pretty much is speculation I'll admit - the NV40 is much more of a transitional chip between NV30 and NV50. What the NV30 is, besides a flop, I don't know though. I guess it'd be reasonable to say that the NV30 was to give a featureset that would be fast on the NV40/50, so that those would get a headstart. Obviously, that was assuming ATI wouldn't do anything worthwhile in that timeframe...

 

So to make a potentially very long post only moderately long... Just like Dave, I expect the there to be a NV40-like chip using NV50 architectural improvements. To a certain extend. I'd expect the idea to be to replace the clock bottlenecks in the NV40 by the NV50 equivalent. This would potentially increase clockrate or/and reduce transistor count. Fundamentally you'd be replacing the units, but not the scheduler/organisation/featureset. MSAA comes to mind too though, as Dave mentionned; making it work with RTT would be important too, but such ideas are problematic because it involves changing many steps of the pipeline. It seems unlikely to me, sadly, and the acronym of NV47 would make me think of an improved NV45; not a nerfed NV50.

 

Replacing the NV40 ALUs by the NV50's would also be quite interesting for NVIDIA, since it'd most likely be the clock bottleneck; this would help them improve it further for the real NV50, at least in theory.

 

Another, completely different, possibility is also worth mentionning: the renaming of the real NV50 to NV60, kinda like what ATI did with the real R400 (although a bit differently). But that would imply the NV47 most likely wouldn't be a high-end refresh (or that it's not a major one), or that it'd due to be renamed soon.

Ah, where are the days IHVs actually kept a product's codename from first rumors to announcement? *grins*