Guest post by Anand Lal Shimpi, founder of Anandtech.com, had the opportunity to sit down with Carrell Killebrew, Eric Demers, Mike Schmit and Mark Leather, collectivley known as the designers behind the current crop of AMD graphics chips, and quiz them about how the RV770 graphics chip came about. In the article, Anand recounts the history that influenced the chip’s design and the obstacles that were overcome from his two hours meeting with the design team.
Nice move, AMD.
This was a very interesting read, thank you for linking this story!
Definitely not a light read, but a great article. Having work at 2 very large engineering companies myself, it presents a rather accurate depiction of how the decision / design process of a new product goes. Espicially when you take into account the design engineers vs management perspective and how risks need to be taken to be successful in high technology.
Great article. Well worth my time.
awesome read. Very interesting. Isn’t competition great
Being chip designer myself I can only confirm that behind every chip there are lot of ideas, lot of work, lot of passion, lot of brightest minds, who spended nights and weekends to get the design out in time. GPUs are the most complex designs in the industry with much shorter life then CPUs, so it is an absolutely incredible management and development piece of work. Just think of the progress in the computer graphics in such short time, which was enabled by NVidia and ATI. So cudos to both companies and its engineers.
Doing a chip seems so risky. It’s so much harder than software because changing course mid-stream is even more expensive and the amount of detail is even greater. And you don’t know if you succeeded until almost years down the line.
With the danger of being a bit off-topic? Does anyone know the status(Performance/stability) of the (Open and/or Closed) source drivers for this chip? Having a chip this fast is no use, if I still have to use software only OpenGL due to driver issues.
I’m not quite sure really. The RV770 is supported in the RadeonHD driver and hardware rendering is being worked on.
Phoronix does a good job of keeping tabs on the state of Linux video drivers. On Aug. 27, 2008 they reported the first working code for hardware rendering had been produced, and none of their reviews have noted any instability from the drivers.
I’ve included some links to articles that might fill in some of your questions, and if not, the Phoronix forums would be a good place to ask around.
Open-Source 3D Success For Radeon RV770
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjY3OQ
Radeon HD4830 Review
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sapphire_hd4830&…
ATI X.Org, Mesa Performance In Ubuntu
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_ati_mesa&…