snowdog said:
fatslob-:O said:
snowdog said:
That's why I said an evolution of the TEV Unit. It's the only reason I can think of why the ALUs are too large for a 160 ALU chip. There's extra logic in there, and it has to do something. And it would also explain why the power draw is so low and why a tiny 8 bit co-processor is needed to run Wii games. |
Some units may be disabled y'know. Each GPU manufacturer may do this because of poor yields on certain parts. The hd 7970 and the 7950 use the SAME DIE but the hd 7950 is weaker because of some photolithographic mistakes. They can't have all billions of transistors being placed perfectly or printed correctly so they'll essentailly disable the units where there are mistakes to sell the new unit at a lower price to reduce costs on manufacturing.
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I doubt that very much. It's on a 40nm process so yields will be exceptional.
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True but at the same time nintendo came with a bigger DIE too. It's not just the graphics processor that has being integrated to the silicon. The eDRAM also took up quite a bit of space too and when you make DIEs bigger it becomes harder to get a better yield. Yield also scales with die sizes too but not just time. 
So my guess is that nintendo decided to go for making the eDRAM a priority rather than making more shaders functional.
