Speaking at yesterday's AMD Financial Analysts Day, Executive Vice President of Visual and Media Businesses, Dave Orton, appeared to throw down the performance gauntlet in favor of AMD's upcoming R600 GPU. Having had over a month to study NVIDIA's G80, Orton did not seem the least bit intimidated. In a slide entitled "R600: Why we lead in graphics", Orton promised that even if the name of the company had changed, that the commitment to GPU performance leadership had not. He promised a "take no prisoners" approach to performance leadership for AMD's new GPU.

More interestingly, in his verbal remarks Orton reported (at roughly the 1:22:30 mark of the webcast) that one of R600's key advantages would be "new levels of memory bandwidth to the graphics subsystem, and bandwidth is critical to graphics performance." As all graphics geeks know, AMD pioneered the move to GDDR4 memory with the Radeon X1950 XTX, which gave them a temporary advantage in bandwidth. However, in the period since NVIDIA has released the 384-bit GeForce 8800 GTX, whose memory bandwidth crushes the X1950 XTX by 86.4GB/s to 64.0GB/s. It is impossible that AMD could regain a significant enough advantage in bandwidth to be cited by Orton as a major competitive advantage without following NVIDIA north of the 256-bit bus that has been a mainstay of the ATI/AMD high-end products since 2002's Radeon 9700 Pro.

R600 will therefore feature a 512-bit external memory bus, likely using 1.2GHz GDDR4 for ~153GB/sec from memory pool to chip, to back up the smack AMD's Executive Vice President laid down.

In other tidbits, Orton also vowed to be first to the 65nm technology process, but did not disclose which product he had in mind for the honor, nor even product type, GPU or chipset. Our graphics-oriented notes (and a few selected slides) on the rest of the conference are included inside, if you dare to take the red pill.