ATi Moves To 90 Nanometre

The 90 Nanometre process is not as troublesome as many of you might think. It's a nice process if you design your chips well and, although ATI had troubles as its chip design had some flaws, they were easy to solve but very hard to spot. Well that is the hard thing about chips, something can always go wrong, just as it can in life.

Nvidia has yet to move to 90 but it is playing with its G71, 90 nanometre core. But it's still not time for that one. That’s next year. Nvidia is very happy with the new G70 A2 revision core. It's the new 7800 GTX 512 chips running at 550 MHz that everyone is talking about but few can afford.

ATI is working on its next generation products and is getting close to taping them out. We won't talk much about R580, the R520 successor as this one is still 90 nanometre but we want to give you a peak into a more distant future.

ATI has three chips based on the 80 nanometre process. One is called RV560 and will be the replacement for the just-announced RV530, Radeon X1600XT. The second two chips are codenamed RV505 and RV535. We know that the RV535 is an RV530 chip based on the 80 nanometre design while the RV505 is a low end chip based on the same process.

Source - The Inquirer

 

Yeah generally it's a pretty sweet move, for the costomer, assuming the companies get it right. Cooler chips, more OC potential, fine by me. Wonder how Intel's 65nm chips will do?

 

Yeah, hopefully it wont be too buggy when they release them!

 

That's for damn sure
How much more OC potential do you think we'd see out of the new process technology? I don't think the chips wouldn't be durastically cooler, probably just 5 degrees or so wouldn't it?

 

IMO - I don't think they'll be cooler. If they make the new chips on the new process then they can make them more powerful which basically cancels out any lower temperatures!

 

Haven't graphics cards manufacturer's been attempting to increase the number of pipelines and the like rather then raw core speeds?

 

Yeah I guess on the flip side you guys are right, although smaller processes have low voltages they have to pack a lot of transistors and silicon into a tiny die and that'll generate a bunch of heat. We'll see soon I guess.