In the R580 case, the chip has 16 traditional pipelines that can process 16 textures while at the same time it can calculate 48 pixel data. The RV530 architecture is a good way to understand what ATI is doing now. With this chip, you have 12 pixel Shaders but just four texture memory units. Its a 3:1 ratio, as ATI believes that you need that many pixel information compared to textures.More details over here.
ATI Radeon X1900 to have 16 pipes, 48 pixel shader units
Posted on Wednesday, December 14 2005 @ 22:35 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck