The Radeon X1000 (R5xx) Series

Due to the delays with R520, and subsequently RV530, the release schedule for the derivatives of the R5xx series have been delayed and the release schedule has been compressed - in fact, RV515 went relatively smoothly, with no unexpected issues, so it is one of the chips that to primarily driving the technology announcements and release on. Although the release of all the parts in the, now dubbed, X1000 series will span a range of between 6-8 weeks ATI are announcing an entire line in one go, rather than do successive launches in a relatively short space of time. Here is a breakdown of the initial range of X1000 products ATI are announcing.

Radeon X1800 XT X1800 XL X1600 XT X1600 PRO X1300 PRO X1300 X1300 HyperMemory
Chip R520 RV530 RV515
Vertex Shaders 8 5 2
"Pixel Shader Pipelines" 16 12 4
Texture Units 16 4 4
Render Outputs 16 4 4
Z Compare Units 16 8 4
Max Threads 512 128 128
Core Clock 625MHz 500MHz 590MHz 500MHz 600MHz 450MHz 450MHz
Memory Clock 750MHz 500MHz 690MHz 340MHz 400MHz 250MHz 500MHz
Memory Bus Width 256-bit 128-bit 128-bit 32-bit
Memory Size 256/512MB 256MB 128/256MB 256MB 128/256MB 32MB
MSRP / RRP $499/$549 $449 $199/$249 $149/$199 $149 $99/$129 $79
Shipping 5-Nov 5-Oct 30-Nov 5-Oct




Radeon X1600 XT
Radeon X1300 PRO


Note: We have X1600 XT and X1300 samples at our disposal however in this article we will concentrate on the X1800 XT and X1800 XL. We will go back and look at each of the X1600 XT and X1300 PRO boards individually in later articles.

Some may question why the X1800 XL's are being introduced immediately, but the XT's coming a month later. Silicon for all the parts are in production, but the final configuration of the silicon and metal layers was resolved fairly late, and with the production times taking up to three months for chip orders to final products the XT's are coming a little later, once those chips appear. ATI can make XL's available fairly shortly because they had placed large silicon orders earlier, but stopped the production once they realised there were still issues, meaning there were many cut wafers but without metal layers – as the issues could be resolved with a change to the contacts and metal layers ATI could utilise the silicon that had already been cut and apply new metal layers and all of these are going towards the initial XL products.

With RV530 suffering from the same issues as R520 wafers were not restarted at the fab until after the fix was verified on R520 and then fixed with RV530, which is why its release is the last in the order. ATI's new Vice President and General Manager of Desktop, Richard Heye (formerly of AMD) stated that this was his decision to hold up the RV530 wafers until R520 was fully verified and that they would try and pull in the RV530 release by a few weeks, but ultimately they are at the mercy of the fabs and the rest of their suppliers.

Performance configurations aside, all of the parts here are equal in terms of their 3D capabilities, meaning that the capabilities of the high end X1800 products are shared all the way down to X1300. The net result of this launch is that within a very short space of time ATI will have an entirely new product line, from top-to-bottom, with technical capabilities that are the same all across that line, which is the first time that ATI have done this.

Regular participants of our forums may well have been aware of some reasonably obscure numbering schemes for many months that were used to describe parts of the performance characteristics, such as 16-1-1-1 for R520, 4-1-3-2 for RV530 and 4-1-1-1 for RV515, but until now the exact meaning of these weren't known. With the specifications for each of the chips we can now derive that the first number equates to the number of ROP's, the second the number of texture units per ROP, the third the number of "shader pipes" per ROP, and finally the Z/Stencil multiplier per ROP - with these figures in mind, we'll let you consider the ramifications for parts in the R5xx series that are still to come...