AMD's anticipated upcoming ATI-branded, DirectX 10-supporting graphics chip, the R600, appears to have made an unscheduled and ahead-of-time stop on the web, revealing itself to be a rather larger part than its predecessor, the R580.

The pics appear in a story on Chinese-language site Zol.com.cn, which claims the chip will ship at the end of January 2007, with an official release window of Q1 2007. Here's one shot - the site has plenty of others.

The R600 is likely to be fabbed at 80nm, and Zol.com.cn reckons it's got over 500m transistors on board. The story presents a side-by-side shot of the R580 and R600, with the latter scaled down to match the physical chip size of the former. If that's an accurate assumption, then the R600's die size is 12-24 per cent bigger than the R580's, despite being fabbed using a smaller process. ®