Citace:
We've just learned that the R580, the successor to the R520, very recently came back from ATI's production factories in its taped-out version, that means the chip is completed and functional, and this on the first time when the R520 took no less than 3 tries to get right. With the accumulated delay of the R520, more than 3 months actually, ATI has had the time to move engineers on its refresh. Developped by a different team than the R520, the R580 should distinguish itself by a slightly different architecture than the former chip. Even though the R580 could be ready earlier than expected, ATI will launch the R520 first in early october. The commercial name of the chip is not yet known but the Radeon brand will apparently be kept.
In a recent interview to a finnish website, the CEO of ATI, Dave Orton, acknowledged the problems encountered with the R520. He indicated that after a successful development of Xenon on 90nm, the graphics chip of the XBox 360, ATI was confident in the future of the R5xx family. The RV515 which targetted the entry level market and of which we spoke in an earlier article has also been made without any problem. On the other hand, the RV530 and R520 were born in pain. Dave Orton indicated on their subject "Even though the simulations seemed perfect, there were a fair bit of problems with the first chips when they came back from the fab. We have also been surprised that the RV515 and RV530, although designed by the same team and for the same factory, gave different results."
Dave Orton also said that the usage of 90nm in all of the upcoming GPU lineup came from the initial success of the Xenon which gave confidence to ATI's teams in a full migration to this production process. Last year for example, ATI had gone for 110nm on some chips while keeping 130nm for others. The president and CEO of ATI concluded today that the R520 and RV530's results seemed excellent and that this indicates they will have a very good market position in terms of performance and quality when available this fall.