ATI will announce - but not necessarily ship - its 90nm R580 graphics chip next month as the Radeon X1900.

So claims Anandtech, citing a company presentation sent to graphics-card manufacturers this week. Other, Far Eastern sites point to a 24 Janaury launch date.

The X1900 is down in the document as sporting 48 pixel-processing pipelines and higher clock speeds than the X1800 - speculation from a number of websites suggests around 700MHz.

Like the X1800, the X1900 will ship in two forms: a standard version and a CrossFire Edition, the latter a pre-requisite for running two X1900 GPUs co-operatively. Like all X1000-series chips, the X1900 will support DirectX 9 Shader Model 3.0 and ATI's 40-bit video processing system, Avivo. The X1900 is said to be pin-compatible with the X1800 XT, and, it has been claimed, will entirely replace the older part.

It will go up against Nvidia's upcoming 90nm G71 chip, which has been alleged to be likewise clocked at 700MHz or beyond. Neither the Nvidia nor the ATI chips may be the first to do so: S3's 700MHz Chrome S27 was launched in November. It is not known if the part has gone into mass production yet. ®