ATI will next week launch its 80nm RV560 chip as the Radeon X1650 XT, it has been claimed. By then, of course, the company will almost certainly be part of AMD and possibly no longer known by its original name.

The 575MHz GPU - incidentally, the same speed Nvidia's upcoming GeForce 8800 GTX is alleged to have been set to - will ship on cards with 256MB of 675MHz GDDR 3 memory, according to a report at DailyTech. The memory connects across a 128-bit bus. The GPU is said to contain 24 pixel shaders in 12 processing pipelines fed by eight vertex shaders.

Like the Radeon X1950 Pro, which ATI released last week - and we reviewed here - the X1650 XT has an internal CrossFire connector, it's alleged.

Earlier this month, the RV560 won the approval of the PCI-SIG for its PCI Express compliance - a crucial step in bringing a GPU to market.

Meanwhile, ATI and AMD will tomorrow be jointly detailing how their respective technologies are to be aligned now the pair have reached the "crossroads of computation and graphics". Expect a full report on Reg Hardware. ®