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The Lord of the Ring - the new ring bus memory controller
Besides the big internal architectural overhaul throughout the chip design, one of the biggest and most impressive changes in the R520 simply has to be the new memory controller. It seriously is a piece of art if you study closely. Once we got the specs presented to us I immediately had to think about the Creative Labs X-Fi, which we recently reviewed. Both products are of course completely different and have, well not very much in common except one thing, an internal ring bus design. Included onto the R520 is a new memory controller that works in a very advanced manner.
I'll try to explain it in a very simple manner because the controller is so advanced you can easily get confused. Take for example a car, which in our case is a memory client request to the memory controller. Look at this entire procedure as traffic, normally you have to deal with congestion at a certain point where it's busy at that crossing right ? If enough cars keep coming in you'll get congestion. What do you do with such traffic congestion/traffic jam? Yes indeed, everywhere in the world we build multi-lane traffic circles and insert traffic lights at the beginning crossings to prioritize and streamline traffic into the right direction.
Now think of the car (client data request) as traffic being sent to the ordinary crossing and in the new situation the traffic circle with traffic lights. Yes this is in laymen terms the way the new controller functions. Huge flows of data traffic are no longer launched towards the memory controllers where it's jammed up, it's now sorted based on a priority flag (at the proverbial traffic lights) and then send into the right direction over the traffic circle. If we color coded 4 data packets green, yellow, blue and orange then each color will have a certain priority, you tag the data request. If red is the color that has the most priority it'll be prioritized and sent to the most memory units connected to the controller. If an 'ornage' data packet has less priority it would be managed in a slower stage. It's way more dynamic in the manner it can handle its memory packets. The end result is a more efficient memory controller that will utilize available bandwidth to the maximum, and memory bandwidth is one of the biggest limitations in the graphics industry so a lot can be won here.
The new ringbus memory controller
Another good thing to know is that the new memory controller can handle any kind of DDR memory, whether that is DDR1 or gDDR3 it will handle it fine. Next to that, and less important for you though, it should be very future proof as it's gDDR4 ready and probably can even work with gDDR5 which is in early design stages already. It has been built with that in mind. It can handle extremely high clocks, it's very dynamic and very efficient according to the theory. The design in all honesty looks like a classy piece of art. Of course the raw performance and effect on overall framerate will, in the end, have the final say.
AVIVO (Advanced Video in and Out)
The media revolution? This is actually the headline used in their presentation. ATI's green friends have a lot of these features integrated already for a while now and wrapped most of it up under the PureVideo en/decoders.
As we all know and as I've been preaching for a while now we see the living room entertainment coming to the PC more and more in a very fast fashion. One of the most popular thing we've noticed here in Europe has to be HDTV and everything related to it. The trend started last year already and hey even yours truly bought a HDTV recently (Ed: and yet he claims he can't pay me =P). It's coming fast and quite frankly, thank God for that as watching content in HD is simply fantastic. So how does that relate to graphics cards? In more ways then you think, just look at the latest trend of HTPC's, Home Theater PC's. Things like Media Center PC's here and there? Do you get where I'm going with this?
Yes exactly this kind of thing is what I am talking about. This is the future of media playback and the PC is going to play a very important role in that. Since it´s a PC you probably want a graphics card in there that can support all the cool and extensive features. Media playback and decoding is a process that can and will be moved towards the graphics card. Both NVIDIA and ATI already had excellent implementations of it. ATI just took it onto a next level though. With exactly this kind of stuff in mind they introduced the new AVIVO feature.
Avivo features according to the ATI website:
- Supports hardware MPEG-2 compression, hardware assisted decode of MPEG-2, H.264 and VC-1 video codecs, and advanced display upscaling
- 64 times the number of colors currently available in current PCs; higher color fidelity with 10-bit processing throughout Avivo´s display engine
- Resolutions, such as 2560x1600 or higher, on the latest digital displays using dual-link DVI, as well as high color depth support over DVI
- Advanced up or down resolution scaling on any flat panel display using ATI´s solutions
- Video capture with features like 3D comb filtering, front-end video scaling, and hardware MPEG video compression
- Hardware noise reduction and 12-bit analog-to-digital conversion
- Supports standard TV, HDTV, video input and all PC displays via digital (DVI, HDMI) and analog (VGA, Component, S-Video, composite) ports
Avivo will be an integral component in all of ATI´s upcoming desktop, mobile, chipset, workstation, and software products. As stated Media Center PC are getting really popular. TV is going digital and HD/HD2(?) Blu-ray and HD-DVD are coming. Digital photography is everywhere. AVIVO is a video and display platform that perfects the video quality. AVIVO will be integral in all future ATI products. Vibrant high fidelity images and video.
Smooth vivid playback. Flawless playback for both SD and HD television that's what this stuff is intended for from a decoding point of view. With two dual link DVI ports which are supported on the entire X1000 range.
Catalyst 5.13 (Christmas 2005 edition download) should include some sweet new functions.
