AMD's
recent takeover of ATi may have
signicant long-term benfits for both but, right now, it doesn't seem to
have done anything for ATI's ability to produce state-of-the-art
graphic processors in a timely fashion.
While trawling the night markets in Old Taipei
with the HEXUS Dragon Tour 2006, ol' Willy Deeplung tells us
he heard word on the street about ATI's promised R600
part - not only how late it now is but also some of the issues there
have been along this yellow brick road.
As many of you know, ATi R600 should be with us now. ATI's AIB
manufacturing partners are gagging for it. The biggest trouble they're
having is that there are no GPUs floating around. None.
Most makers are feeling very much in the dark over this one, so we
thought we'd update you by sharing all of the little information we've
been able to gather.
R600 has had several challenges, principally over power and
cooling.
ATi has looked at water-cooling and traditional air cooling.
But, the speed of the processor and its resultant heat output have
meant that ATi also had to consider more complex hi-tech
solutions.
So, the company turned to
NanoFoil cooling
technology. This, as best we can understand, works by having ultra-thin
nanolayers of aluminium and nickel that can
be kicked into life by heat, electricity or mechanical or optical
stimulation, causing a reaction that gives off heat in a
controlled fashion.
But NanoFoil is a solution that's been looking for a problem since the
turn of 2003, and hasn't as far as we known, had any real-life use for
cooling GPUs, CPUs or anything similar.
At the heart of the cooling problem, though, is the R600's
power requirements. These are nothing short
of laughable at the moment.
With the clock speeds the company's looking to deploy, R600's
requirements seem like they're going to outpace those of NVIDIA Quad
parts. Cooling issues only make things worse and it's still
unclear what steps ATi can take to solve these dual problems.
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