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It's Official — AMD Will Retire the ATI Brand
J. Dzhugashvili writes "A little over four years have passed since AMD purchased ATI. In May of last year, AMD took the remains of the Canadian graphics company and melded them into a monolithic products group, which combined processors, graphics, and platforms. Now, AMD is about to take the next step: kill the ATI brand altogether. The company has officially announced the move, saying it plans to label its next generation of graphics cards 'AMD Radeon' and 'AMD FirePro,' with new logos to match. The move has a lot to do with the incoming arrival of products like Ontario and Llano, which will combine AMD processing and graphics in single slabs of silicon."
ATI really only started doing that after they were acquired by AMD so I wouldn't worry too much.
With a 3 GHz clock, a signal at the speed of light travels 10 cm during one clock cycle. This means that if a chip needs data from another and there's a distance of five centimeters or more between both chips the data will not arrive in the same clock cycle.
No, there are two logos, as seen in the article. One with an "AMD Radeon" logo for discrete cards and one with just "Radeon Graphics" for PC makers building Intel-based systems.
AMD is actually a much older brand than ATI.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
because it states "The badges you see above will be used for systems with discrete Radeon and FirePro graphics cards. The lower row omits the AMD logo, so PC makers shipping Intel-based systems will be able to avoid the oil-and-water combo of Intel and AMD branding, if they wish."
But propagation speed is a signficant fraction of C. (66 to 96 percent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity ) Admittedly you've got a point, they've already gotten past 3GHZ. (I'm just wondering how much faster they can get before signal speed is actually the limiting factor.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Yeah, 3ghz doesn't come close to the light speed barrier. i think the issue is more from heat dissipation and electron bleed...
moving the gpu on-die will fix the latency associated with the pci-e bus, but it's not because of the reasons you seem to believe
Want to bet?
At 3 GHz, light moves just 7.2 cm, given a typical upper range for the velocity factor of copper of 0.72. Silicon and fibre optics are usually worse, with a VF between 0.4 and 0.6, or between 4 and 6cm per clock. That's barely enough to traverse a CPU die, let alone the motherboard. Moving parts physically closer together has a lot to do with the speed of light!
Assuming the signals travel in a straight line. If you look at current motherboards and video cards, you'll notice that many of the copper traces are "wiggly", not straight. That is done in order to get bits in parallel buses to arrive at the same time, and conductor traces on the chips must be designed similarly, it's the longest distance that any of the bits must travel that limits the others.
Besides, there are capacitance and inductance effects to be considered. Transitions from one to zero and vice-versa aren't instantaneous and that must be taken into account.
One could say that 9 GHz would be the absolute physical limit for a 1.7 cm chip and the technical limit is somewhat lower than that.
For a set of chips on a board, the absolute physical limit is much lower, and that's the reason why on-chip cache memory has become so important lately.
Reading comprehension fail. Nobody said that you can't go above 3 GHz for the CPU, but that if you do, if a chip needs data from another and there's a distance of five centimeters or more between both chips the data will not arrive in the same clock cycle
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Want to bet?
At 3 GHz, light moves just 7.2 cm, given a typical upper range for the velocity factor of copper of 0.72. Silicon and fibre optics are usually worse, with a VF between 0.4 and 0.6, or between 4 and 6cm per clock. That's barely enough to traverse a CPU die, let alone the motherboard. Moving parts physically closer together has a lot to do with the speed of light!
I really would mod this informative, since I was about to make a similar point. I think a lot of the confusion is that people hear things like the Speed of Light in terms of Kilometers per second, and it gets filed away by the brain as inconsequential for scales which are measured in centimeters and MUCH smaller.
But when you realize that that scale which is only a factor measured in millions meters per second is being divided into segments that are fractions of billionths of a second, the speed of light manifests in a much more physically understandable term.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
fglrx support for r500 and earlier (anything before the HD lines) is already delegated to the open-source drivers. We're working on getting r800 (redwood) support for acceleration together, and r600 support is getting better by the day.
~ C.
I don't know what you are talking about. I have had just as many Nvidia problems as ATI in the past. Currently, I have no ATI driver problems.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
As one of my electrical engineering professors was fond of saying: "What is the speed of light? As far as you're concerned, it's nine inches per nanosecond."