TR: We've heard that the Radeon X800 is 160 million transistors and the GeForce 6800 is 222 million. Our own die size comparison showed about a 10% difference between the two chips. If one counted transistors by adding up all possible transistors on the chip like NVIDIA does, what would the X800's transistor count be?
Nalasco: One thing about counting transistors is that every time you see a transistor count on a chip, it's almost certainly a rough estimate. The reason is that there's no simple and straightforward way to just go and count all the transistors on a large ASIC. Usually, what you can at least get is a fairly accurate gate count. That can be generated by the tools when you're creating the chip. And from the gate count, you can make some assumptions to generate a reasonable estimate of the number of transistors by guessing at the number of transistors per gate. But of course, different gates in different places in the chip are going to use different numbers of transistors, and then there's the caches and things which have their own sort of unique counts of transistors. So what happens is that anything that you generate ends up being an estimate based on certain assumptions that you're making, and really, the transistor count figure is much less important than, as you mentioned, the actual die size that you end up with.
And as you did say, whatever the transistor figures that are being quoted might indicate, our die size is approximately ten to fifteen percent smaller, we believe, than the GeForce 6800 series. So when it comes down to it, we believe we've been able to achieve better performance, better image quality, with a smaller number of transistors, and that's really probably the most significant thing to take away from those marketing features.