Very promising news on ATI's new approach to Crossfire in the new R700:
Cnet.com
Behold the proprietary inter-processor communication technology
NordicHardware
Quote:
| AMD-ATI's upcoming R700 (rumored to be called the 4870 X2) two-chip graphics board will be the ultimate test of this strategy. "It's a new proprietary inter-processor communication technology. If they put these two chips on one board and it does scale properly, then they have pulled off a coup," he said. "When you gang up graphics chips (using the traditional Scalable Link Interface or CrossFire technologies) they roll off pretty fast. ("Roll off" implies that performance doesn't scale up well.) "So when you put two boards in, you don't get twice the performance but you (only) get one and a half. You put four boards in and you (only) get about 1.7, 1.8. What ATI is saying is that with two chips using (their) proprietary inter-bus, they will get 1.8 (the performance) with two chips. If that's true, you can expect to see four of them giving you something around 2.5." Getting 2.5 times the performance from four boards would be a masterstroke for ATI. |
Behold the proprietary inter-processor communication technology
Quote:
| The PLX chip between the GPUs now supports PCIe 2.0, but the exact nature of the remaining changes are yet to be unveiled. The card has two 512MB GDDR5 memory buffers, most likely the same 3.6GHz chips found with Radeon HD 4870. We suspect these won't be shared as so many were hoping. Some performance indications have also been posted and they state that Radeon HD 4870X2 will outperform Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire with around 15% with a decent system in general. We should know more as we approach the launch in late August. |
