Ultra high-end R700 to finally play Crysis at 60fps in 2010!!!

for 3dfx reference: voodoo5 like=bad, voodoo2 like=good.

With today's modern technology moving more and more toward multiple processor designs, I don't think this will be a bad product at all.
I think by now they know all the pro's and con's, and will make it work.

CPU's certainly are moving this direction, it was only a matter of time before GPU's did the same.

It had to be Cyril! Two to four times faster (2Tflops versus 500Gflops) is not what is generally referred to as "an order of magnitude" difference. Then again, we are in a binary world :-p

I do not see the point of multicore GPUs as GPUs are inherently parallel such that you could simply double the number of everything on a chip and get a better effect because of all of the redundant circuitry and programming that would be needed to make a dual core GPU work that will not be necessary in a single core GPU. The only thing that is being saved with a multicore GPU is development time, not die space and definitely not power consumption.

Perhaps GPU development is becoming too difficult for AMD or AMD wants to reallocate chip development resources elsewhere.

According to Fudzilla

According to the Weekly World News. Elvis' alien love child will return to earth riding the loch ness monster to herald the second coming of Jezus.

Eventually we'll have specialized multi-core. So on a 10-core chip you might have 6 cores for CPU-like functions and 4 cores for GPU-like functions. Or you could go even more specialized and say one of those GPU cores is going to perform Physics-like functions. It all depends on whether there is a performance gain by specializing for a certain function, and whether that certain function is needed by enough users. Multi-core CPU's, GPU's and AMD's on-board memory controller is just a start.

This does fit with AMD's whole modular CPU plans. Its already been said that the 1st Fusion will be a dual die setup so i expect that we will have one of these cores and a CPU die on the same package at first.

As for the GPUs it seems like AMD has already planned ahead a little.
1) There current chips use a ring bus memory controller for the different clusters, you could still do this with multiple dies on 1 package with a little work.
2) The R670 have about half the memory bandwidth on the R600 but are generally better performers. AMD said that they optimised the memory use in the GPU.
3) The render logic on the 360 is separate from the main die and gives free 4xAA on 720p images but using the edram. This could work on the 700 GPU, the data from all cores goes to the one render unit that applies the AA/AF. 32mb of edram should give you 4xAA on 1920x1080 for free (4xAA because thats mandatory in DX10.1).
4) AMD is putting a lot of effort into CrossfireX, the work done in these drivers should really help any multiple die GPU drivers.
5) It makes economic sense, AMD is really pushing the process technology for the GPUs. Normally you manufacture your highend GPUs on the old process, the few times the highend was manufactured on the new process it turned out bad (dustblowers). Since there would be no difference between AMDs low end and high end chips they could continually be on the newest process tech. Plus only manufacturing 1 chip has got to be cheaper and easier to optimise.

Am I mistaken when I say you will be able to have 16 distinctly recognised videocards in a system? (4 cards, 4 cores on each)
Soon to evolve Crossfire X into Crossfire More-Geeky-Letter.

Isn't the real answer to ATi doing this: do they really have a choice? Intel and AMD have been progressing to multi-core for years (along with other players in similar markets), GPUs simply haven't caught up.

Sounds like another way to make GPU tech that can scale across market segments. Each R700 core can be simpler than one giant core and they can just tack them together for the high-end part. Hopefully it works better than SLI/Crossfire. If they are all on the same package or die, communication can be stupidly fast.

Multi-core on one die has many advantages. One being lowering debugging time. Both R420 and R520 have proved how difficult it is to debut an error in a complex chip. This was the reason that both were posponed for so long (6 months or something).
This way of designing a chip would leave you with debugging two smaller cores: one part that holds all shared logic and one part that holds the gpu logic. That gpu logic is then copied over and over.

Quad Crossfire on one card?

Finally. With more transistors than CPUs, it only makes sense to put more cores onto a GPU. But the problem is, its still crossfire (or SLI if Nvidia went along). It'll most likely be cheaper, so thats good. And with the cores being able to communicate faster because of their distance to each other, crossfire/sli may achieve 100% performance.

Smaller cores often increase yields vs one big hunk of inter-related logic, so even on a single die it can matter. This is why there are lotsa upcoming multi-core designs in the GPU and CPU markets... the shrinking of processes is leading to allot of free die area to fill stuff in, and putting multiple core there may sometimes offer better return on investment vs building something more complex to fill in that space, diminishing returns for that complexity and all.

I assume that these cores would be connected via some form of crossbar, and that there would also be another "core" that incorporated all the shared logic, memory controller, video decode engine, etc.

I don't see how this is radically different from the current setup of varying the amount of of units in current GPUs.

I could see it if the dies were separate, connected via a very fast form of HyperTransport for example. You'd get the benefit of smaller dies which have higher yield, and of matching dies that match a certain speed, and of scaling too (one die up to say 4 dies).

(This is what AMD should have done in 2006 to get a Quad-core CPU out before Intel, but that company seems to be seriously lacking vision and is also putting idealism (native quad-core!!!) before making money.)

We've seen this 'top-to-bottom' multicore approach before, and the results were not pretty. Remember 3dfx's death knell?

If this runs as fast as it sounds, then I think a lot of the R&D that went into Phenom is being put to good use, and AMD just MAY end up righting the ship.

If it is not supported well by drivers and newer games, then it may be the straw that broke the camels back.

would i be wrong to assume that when they mention multi-core graphics, its like slapping on an Athlon X2 on a graphics card? coz i'm pretty fuzzy on GPU architecture

I am not really that surprised.

It is just becoming too damm difficult and economically impractical to keep designing and engineer more mega-GPU dies.

In order words, the benefits of die shrinkage are shrinking while the penalties for leakage and increasing transistor budget remain.

Nvidia will run into the same problem and opt for AMD's more realistic path. Make a bunch of smaller, but separate dies and intelligently balance the workload. The difficult part and engineering challenge is the latter.

four or more R700 cores in one die

In one die on on one "package". Putting them all in the same die doesn't make sense to me.

This would be a lot more interesting/fascinating/curious/revolutionary too if each "core" was specialized as in a core full of shaders, a core for raster operations, a core for this, a core for that...

This is good.. But just the one thing to be aware of, the higher chips card carry the hungrier the card will be.

In the same way that a Radeon 9800XT is a dualcore Radeon 9600 Pro then....

doubling the number of pipelines on a chip does not a dualcore make.

So, "SLI on a chip" ?

I guess this might be better from a manufacturing standpoint than making bigger cores -- higher yields for smaller chips.