The RV770 Story: Documenting ATI's Road to Success
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 2, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Dave Baumann Saves the Radeon HD 4850
ATI had this habit of finding good reviewers and bringing them on staff. Our first Graphics Editor, Matthew Witheiler, went to work for ATI after graduating from Duke. He was with AnandTech for a good three years before ATI snagged him, he ended up being ATI’s youngest Product Manager (congrats on the engagement Matthew). One other prominent reviewer ATI grabbed ahold of was Dave Baumann of Beyond3D fame and brought him on to do technical marketing.
One of Baumann’s strongpoints was the ability to analyze the competitive landscape given that’s what he did for Beyond3D before ATI. One of Dave’s first major tasks at ATI was to compare R600 to G80 internally, which wasn’t exactly the best job in November of 2006. Obviously, G80 had a significant impact on RV770. While the architecture was set in stone, clock speeds, board layout and memory sizes were all variable until early 2008.
Initially, RV770 was targeted at 1.5x the performance of R600, which looking back would not have been enough. During the next 1.5 years that 1.5x turned into 2x R600 and finally settled at 2.5x the speed of R600, at a price in the $200 - $300 range.
Dave became a product manager on RV770 by February 2008, which was a big deal given that he hadn’t been with ATI that long and this was a very important product. RV670 saw ATI return to competition in the year prior, but RV770 needed to put ATI back on top.
When Dave took the 770 under his wing a lot of the product had already been mapped out, the chip was back from the fabs and at this point ATI’s engineering team wasn’t ready or eager to make any changes. The RV770 XT sat well with Mr. Baumann (the XT was the internal name of the Radeon HD 4870), in his words “the specifications were perfect”. There was a late change to the 4870 that gave it its second PCIe power connector, but that’s it. Arguably the more important version, the RV770 Pro that would become the Radeon HD 4850, concerned him - it was a bit under spec’d.
Here’s a quick put-yourself-in-ATI’s-shoes test. Your engineering team has spent the past three years on a product that may fail miserably because it’s a radical departure from how you’ve designed GPUs in the past. Your last major GPU architecture launch failed miserably (R600), and the last refresh (RV670) did ok but still didn’t really snag real mindshare from NVIDIA. You’ve just finished this radical new design, and this young new PM with an accent comes in three months before you’re supposed to enter production and tells you that you need to make changes. It was a ballsy move by Baumann, but he wasn’t interested in saving face, he was trying to help his team win. The engineers could’ve just as easily cast him aside, but they listened and they worked, oh did they work. The final stretch is rarely the quickest or the easiest, and this is very true about RV770.
The Radeon HD 4850 was originally a 256MB card with a 500MHz core clock and 900MHz memory clock. Dave insisted that the card needed 512MB of GDDR3 and 625MHz core / 993MHz memory clock, it’s not just that he insisted, but that he convinced the engineers to make such a late change. Dave took the engineers through his reasoning of why and where ATI needed to be in the competitive landscape, by the end of the discussion he didn’t need to persuade them, the board and ASIC teams were championing the changes.
Had it not been for these modifications, the 4850 would not have put as much pressure on NVIDIA’s GeForce 9800 GTX and its pricing wouldn’t have needed to fall so quickly.
Thanks Dave.
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MrSpadge - Saturday, December 6, 2008 - link
Exactly what I was thinking! That's why I got a 8500LE back then, when Geforce 4 was not in (public) sight yet.FireSnake - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
... which one is Anand (on the picture at the beginning of the article)?I always wondered how he looks like ... I guess the one on the right.
3DoubleD - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I've had Anandtech as my home page for 5 years and I've read almost every article since (and even some of the older ones). This is by far one of your greatest works!Thanks
hellstrider - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Kudos to Anand for such a great article, extremely insightful. I may even go out and purchase AMD stock now :)I love AMD even when it’s on the bottom, I own 780G + X2 + hd4850, in hopes that Deneb (or AM3 processors for that matter) will come in time to repeat the success of rv770 launch, at which point I will upgrade my obsolete X2 and have a sweet midrange machine.
My only concern is that Nvidia is looking at all this smirking and planning an onslaught with the 55nm refresh. There is a very “disturbing” article at Xbitlabs that Nvidia is stock-piling the 55nm GT200 parts; seems like that’s something they would do – start selling those soon and undercut 4800 series badly.
I’m just a concerned hd4850 owner and I don’t want to see my card obsolete within couple of months. I don’t really see AMD’s answer to 55nm GT200 in such short period of time?!?!
Any thoughts?
Goty - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I don't think you'll have to worry too badly about the 55nm G200s. NVIDIA won't drop prices much, if at all; they're already smarting from the price drops enacted after the RV770 launch. There's also the fact that the 4850 isn't in the same market space as any of the G200 cards, so they're not really competitive anyhow.ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I always imagined designing GPUs would be very stressful given you're trying to guess things years in advance, but this inside look at how things are done was very informative.On GDDR5, it's interesting to read that ATI was pushing so hard for this technology and they felt it was their only hope for the RV770. What about GDDR4? I thought ATI was a big supporter of it too and was the first to implement it. I'm pretty sure Samsung announced GDDR4 that could run at 3.2GBit/s in 2006 which isn't far from the 3.6GBit/s GDDR5 used in the 4870, and 4GBit/s GDDR4 was available in 2007. I guess there are still power savings to be had from GDDR5, but performance-wise I don't think it would have been a huge loss if GDDR5 had been delayed and ATI had to stick with GDDR4.
And another interesting point in your article was definitely about the fate of the 4850. You report that ATI felt that the 4870 was perfectly specced and wasn't changed. I guess that meant they were always targeting the 750MHz core frequency that it launched with. Yet ATI was originally targeting the 4850 at 500MHz clock. With the 4870 being clocked 50% faster, I think it should be obvious to anyone just looking at the clock speed that there would be a huge performance gap between the 4850 and 4870. I believe the X1800XL and X1800XT had a similarly large performance gap. Thankfully Dave Baumann convinced them to clock the 4850 up to a more reasonable 625MHz core.
One thing that I feel was missing from the article was how the AMD acquisition effected the design of the RV770. Perhaps there wasn't much change or the design was already set so AMD couldn't have changed things even if they wanted to, but they must have had an opinion. AMD was probably nervous that they bought ATI at it's height when the R580 was out and top, but once acquired, the R600 came out and underperformed. Would be interesting to know what AMD's initial opinion of ATI's small die, non-top tier targetted strategy was although it now seems to be more consistent with AMD's CPU strategy since they aren't targeting the high-end there anymore either.
hooflung - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
The final frontier market share wise is to steal a major vendor like eVGA. If they can get an eVGA, BFG or XFX to just sell boards with their warranties AMD would be really dominant.JonnyDough - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
The best thing I've ever read on a tech site. This is why you're better than THG.Only one typo! It was a "to" when it should have been a "too."
Chalk one up for the red team. This makes my appreciation for AMD rise even more. Anyone willing to disclose internal perspectives about the market like this is a team with less secrecy that I will support with my hard earned cash. So many companies could stand up and take a lesson here from this (i.e. Apple, MS).
Keep articles like this coming, and I'll keep coming back for more.
Sincerely,
~Ryan
epyon96 - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
I have been an avid reader of this site for close to 8 years. I used to read almost every CPU, GPU and novelty gadget articles page to page. But over the years, my patience is much lower and I realize I get just as much enjoyment and information from just reading the first page and last page and skimming a few benchmarks.However, this is the first article in a while that I spent reading all of it and I thoroughly enjoyed it. These little back stories with a human element in one of the most interesting recent launches provides a refreshing change from boring benchmark-oriented articles.
I hope to find an article based on Nehpalem of a similar nature and other Intel launches.
GFC - Wednesday, December 3, 2008 - link
Wow, all i can say is that i loved this review. It was realy enjoyable to read, and i must give my thanks to Anandtech and Carrell!