“I’ve just taken a look at a leaked engineering spec for the Fir and at first glance it looks almost too good to be true, for a first graphics processor from AMD. Supporting a 256-bit memory bus and being fully compatible with WGF1.0 with its four quad fragment, and six vertex unit, setup means the chip won’t be small, even using AMD’s 90nm SOI process at their fabs in Dresden.
It’s going to have roughly the transistor count of a pair of current 130nm Athlon FX processors. It also looks like it can share vertex load with a dual core processor, too, letting you use one of the cores entirely for geometry processing, to go with the vertex units on the Fir core. It looks like impressive stuff, with it hinting at future virtualisation of the render core in a possible Apollo Fir 2006 refresh, to go with the WGF2.0 spec.
And 2GB of framebuffer will definitely come in handy for the upcoming version of Playboy: The Mansion that uses masses of uncompressed normal maps for even better breasticle fidelity.
