ATI's R600 has 64 real pipes

[Gizmo]

"When we first time heard that R600 was going to be a big chip we could figure out that ATI wanted to completely redesign the chip and fill it full of lot pipes."

Read more on the Front Page:
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/content/view/1060/2/

[cadaveca]

I really wish that the media would stop calling them "pipes". There are not 64 seperate paths fora pixel to follow...each pipe will allow vertex or shader operations, however, some of these "pipes" will be geometry shaders, and texture address units....and the exact ratio these will be split up into is not known yet.

The R580 is the perfect example...it's quotes as having 16 "pipes", however only 12 feed shader operations while 4 are Texture address units.


I've said it time and again, and I'll say it once more....there are no longer pipelines in current GPU marchitechture!

[Gizmo]

I thought nVidia still used real pipes?

[cadaveca]

Nope. They refer to thiers as "domains". the actual clockspeeds of these domains differ slightly as well, although they do operate best @ a cetain ratio to one another, as is most obvious.