WORD IS HITTING the street about the last ATI Evergreen card. The top 5 were recently named, but there is a sixth lurking in the shadows.
The new card is called Trillian, and it is supposed to be at the top of the heap. It is a card name, not a new ASIC, so don’t expect any new silicon. Just like Hemlock is two Cypresses on a board instead of a new chip, Trillian is also made up of existing silicon.
The name has some interesting connotations, the first three letters of which are ‘tri’. That leaves two interpretations, the most obvious of which is a three GPU board. There have been a few demos here and there of three GPU boards, but nothing that ever made production.
Given that the interconnect on the 3870×2 and 4870×2 are simple PCIe-2 switches, it should be pretty easy to do a three-way board. A 16x PCIe-2 slot is more than capable of providing the needed bandwidth, even with Cypress’s immense shader count. This scenario is pretty doubtful though, a 3x Cypress board would run into power limits unless ATI pulled off some serious magic that the TSMC 40nm process seems currently (pun intended) incapable of providing.
The more likely Trillian board is a multi-monitor card that has been spoken about as far back as Computex. Multiple outs fit into existing leaks quite well, but what chip it is based on is quite another question entirely.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
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