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RADEON 9700 Based Graphics Cards with 256MB of Memory: Are They Real?
It is widely known fact that people often buy products that are clocked higher, contain more memory, have attractive look or because of the famous brand-name. If I ask an average customer at BestBuy would he or she prefer Intel Celeron 3.0GHz or Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz, he will choose the former with high probability. Almost the same happens with videocards. Although graphics cards with 128MB in general have no advantages over those with 64MB, a lot of users gladly buy 128MB devices, even if those products are based on the GeForce4 MX440 that is pretty slow.
Apparently, Xelo and TYAN plan to launch their graphics cards powered by the RADEON 9700 PRO graphics processors with 256MB of onboard memory, according to the information that can be seen on their web-sites. Both companies do not indicate the timeframe when such solutions will be announced, but just tell us about the possibility of their appearance. I do not know whether extra 128MB of DDR SDRAM memory give any performance boost for the RADEON 9700 PRO, however, what I know for sure is that they cost quite a lot.
In fact, current PCB version of the RADEON 9700 PRO does not allow manufacturers to install more than 128MB of memory using the memory chips they utilise now. As you probably know from various reviews and pictures of the mentioned graphics card, there are eight 128Mb memory chips on both sides of the board that provide 128MB of DDR SDRAM in total.
Currently only Samsung and Infineon supply BGA memory chips that can run at speeds above 600MHz. Both memory makers only sell 128Mb products. It should be pointed out that Samsung memory is installed on most of the GeForce4 Ti and RADEON 9700 based graphics cards, while Infineon is used on Matrox Parhelia graphics cards. It seems that memory controllers in modern GPUs are designed to work with certain types of memory only. As a result, it can be concluded that there are a number of differences between memory chips from Hynix and Infineon. The latter, for example was not used on the GeForce3 powered graphics cards and was not recommended by NVIDIA due to high latency. It is rumoured that both Samsung and Micron manufacture relatively slow memory because of high latency and certain other aspects. Provided that both RADEON 9700 and GeForce4 Ti memory controllers are developed with high latency memory chips in mind and chips supplied by Samsung are really as slow as several sources claim, they can be changed on chips from Hynix quite easily. It does mean that ATI will be able to utilise the recently announced 256Mb memory chips from Hynix (see this news-story) for the 256MB RADEON 9700 PRO. If the RADEON 9700 cannot work normally with Hynix memory, ATI will have to redesign its PCB, make it bigger and more expensive. It is not a problem for a $1000 professional FIRE GL X1, while it is an obstacle for the consumer-oriented RADEON 9700.
In fact, Matrox installs all eight memory chips from Infineon on the front side of their Parhelia graphics card and there is enough space for another eight 128Mb chips on the back side of the device.
As for timeframes when such graphics cards can be announced, I suggest that ATI and partners will unveil their RADEON 9700 PRO powered products with 256MB of memory when NVIDIA rolls-out the highly-anticipated NV30 VPU. I have no idea about the price, though.
Source: xbitlabs
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