R600 was delayed. But why? Ask Rick Bergman

As you know Radeon HD 2000 Series were released yesterday. First release date was autumn of the past year. So delay is about 6 months. But why? TG Daily took an interview with Rick Bergman. He explained it. Here is a cut from interview:

TG Daily: Let’s get right to it. The R600 arrives about six months late. What is the story behind this delay?

Rick Bergman: There are a couple of reasons. The first reason is that there were design issues that needed to be resolved. And then, later, we decided to retarget the product at a very attractive price point. We had a higher price point board coming down the line that involved a lot more cost around the bill of materials, memory devices and so on. And we wondered whether or not that was what the market was really looking for. So, we decided to introduce a $399 price point [for a high-end card] with a brand new technology.

This is a 700-million transistor chip, so as we debugged it, with the cache structures, DX10, the new architecture and so on, it just took us a little longer to iron it out this time.

As you see AMD decided to renew own card before release. I don’t think this was good idea. Half a year has passed. HD 2900XT isn’t the powerfull card, 8800GTX leaves it behind. So what we have for $399? High-end card, called Radeon, cheaper than 8800GTS, good overclocking abilities, but not the most powerful card in the world. Middle in high-end segment I say. That’s we were waiting for? AMD can’t answer Nvidia’s 8800 even after almost a year. I hope AMD’s marketologists will be shot.

If we’ll forget about R600 and read fully the interview we can find interesting thinkings. Rick Bergman says something about discrete graphics vs. intergrated one. I tried to make comparison in my own article, called Laptop and desktop comparison. Fusion (CPU with integrated GPU) will have 16 graphics cores and will satisfy gamer-”user of notebook”.

Well, I give you link. Hurry up and read this interview

Written by admin on January 15th, 2007 with no comments.
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