LOSTCIRCUITS

R300 and RADEON 9700

We have witnessed the leapfrogging of graphics processing units beyond the transistor counts of even today's most powerful CPUs. Take the AMD Thorougbred (37 million transistors) and add it to Intel's Northwood (55 million transistors) and you are still short of the transistor count of 107 million that the ATI R300 core powering the RADEON 9700 throws on the scale. The only VPU in the same league is the 3Dlabs VP10 processor featuring also 110 million transistors.

Jewelle Schiedel-Webb: Lost in time, lost in space, and meaning

At One Glance

107 million transistors Core/ memory: 300/600 MHz DDR for ~ 20 GB/sec 300 million triangles /sec 256 bit memory interface up to 256 MBytes of local frame buffer supported 4 x 64-bit Quad Channel Interface (4 independent memory controllers linked by crossbar technology) 4 vertex decoders 8 pixel pipelines first floating point pixel processor 128 bit floating point raster pipelines floating point frame buffer 16 textures per pass 256 simultaneous, parallel operations HyperZ-III Hierarchical Z Early Z Fast Clear-III LossLess Compression

AGP 8X (2 GB/sec) dual integrated 400 MHz DACs Integrated TMDS transmitter Hardware DVD decoding FULLSTREAM DEBLOCKING SMARTSHADER 2.0 SMOOTHVISION 2.0 HYDRAVISION DX9 OpenGL 1.4

The R300 VPU

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