Fast bring up and the board team
Time from blank design to working silicon - continued
HEXUS: So does that 12 months include sending the chip back for any respins? Actually, did RS480 need any respins at all? I heard whispers within ATI that your team is known for getting silicon back working with performance and stability you could probably ship with?John: Well, we do well with that side of things. RS480 came back working first time and got a silicon spin for some minor stuff before we went to full production. We could probably have shipped the bridge on A11 if we wanted to, though. Now this is a cool story. RS482, which is the 110nm shrink of RS480, we got that back in a full package, first silicon, and nine minutes after getting the package we had it up and running, running 3DMark05. That's nine minutes from being handed the package, getting it onto a socket on the board, getting the BIOS set and booting the OS, before getting 3DMark05 up and running on the core.
HEXUS: Well, you knew that RS480 worked! TSMC did the hard work for you *laughs*
John: Haha, OK, take RX480 then. First silicon came back packaged and we had that up and running on a board in 20 minutes. It only took so long because we had to flash the BIOS for the board which we hadn't done yet.
HEXUS: *laughs* OK, OK, we get your point. You must be proud that you get chips back first time working and your respins, if any, are pretty minor?
John: Of course. Makes life much easier for us and the board team who produce the products based on our ASICs.
Working with the board team
HEXUS: So can we talk about the board team a bit, and the products they're responsible for?John: Sure. So you'll have seen Sapphire's Grouper board recently I guess. The red and white one?
HEXUS: Yeah, we saw that RS480 board back at CeBIT this year.
John: Right. So I've got one of those up and running right now with overclocked Athlon 64 FX-57, 2GB of memory pulling 3.5V on all four slots, overclocked, running overclocked graphics and a couple of disks. It's solid as a rock running like that and that's the kind of stuff we want to show you guys. The Grouper is a proper overclockers board, right, moreso than any we've produced to date. And the numbers I've got in my lab are what you'll get when it goes on sale. There's no difference, I've got the same board you'll get with all the same tweaks and adjustments.
HEXUS: So you're going after NVIDIA boards, stuff like DFI's LanParty UT nF4, in the eyes of the serious overclocker and enthusiast looking for maximum performance?
John: Absolutely. Absolutely. DFI will have a Crossfire RD480 board like the Sapphire too, with all the tweaks we've done to get it running massively out of spec compared to the basic platform. This is all production stuff right now, retail boards. Grouper is a pretty hot reference design from the board team using our ASICs and we're both really proud of it.
HEXUS: So I guess starting with Bullhead, that's been a mission for you guys to get some mindshare and then marketshare back from NVIDIA in terms of enthusiast mainboards?
John: YYeah, correct. We've still got some work to do and we're hoping for even better things in the future of course, with new products, but right now we've got Grouper and Halibut (Halibut is a Crossfire version of Grouper) that are doing great. Crossfire works really well with Halibut and we want to see validation of the overclocks we've worked on.
