WE MANAGED TO get a few more details about ATI's next high end chip. It turns up that the R520 is built on a 90 nanometre marchitecture and will end up with as much as 300 to 350 millions of transistors.
We reported some months ago that R520 will have up to 300 million transistors but it turned out that ATI manage to squeeze even more transistors on its die. This leads up to the fact that it's very likely to have more pipelines than in the current generation. Last number was 16 and now it's time to go toward 24 we would speculate.
It will be introduced sometime either in May or in early June but I would not be that optimistic that you will actually be able to buy any of them just after the launch. It all takes time, as you know.
We dont believe its going to be easy to cool 300 to 350 millions or transistors but we think that ATI won't have too many problems to cool this card and make it quiet.
NVIDIA'S NEXT generation graphic remains a well protected secret. We still managed to get some information about it, despite that.
We confirmed that G70 is the real thing and we learned that Nvidia has one more chip down the road codenamed the G80. We expect it to be based on 90 nanometre and have more pipes than NV40. We don't think that it will be dual graphics core stuff but you never know, you kow.
We suspect this card should be ready sometimes in September time even some people suggested April as a possibility. But we believe that April is just a poisson d'Avril, or mayhaps a red herring.
For comparison:
R420 = 180M transistors
NV40 = 220M transistors
Vroom?