ATI readies 80nm desktop GPUs for October?

By Hard Reg, 15th September 2006

ATI will unveil Radeon X1950 Pro and X1650 XT graphics chips and add-in cards on 17 October, according to reports from Taiwanese moles and leaked documents intended for the company's customers.

The cards are expected to be the first to sport ATI's new internal CrossFire connector, which differs from Nvidia's SLI link by placing two, not one, proprietary connectors on the top of each add-in board.

The X1950 Pro - codenamed RV570 and fabbed at 80nm - contains 36 pixel shader engines in 12 parallel pipelines and eight vertex engines. The core is said to be clocked at 580MHz. It'll hook up to GDDR 3 video memory running at 1.4GHz.

The X1650 XT - aka RV560 - is also an 80nm part, the reports claim. This time there are eight pipelines feeding 24 pixel shaders. It will be clocked to 600MHz and, again, the memory will run at 1.4GHz, albeit over a 128-bit bus. The X1950 Pro apparently uses a 256-bit memory bus. ®

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