The RV 250 "almost official" numbers

WE REPORTED a few weeks back ATI has some extra cards up its sleeves in the poker game it is playing with Nvidia which some have dubbed the Battle of the Titaniums.

Now a few web sites have revelaed ATI will launch its new core code named RV250 at the German show SnoBIT in March, and according to people who saw the card it will Nvidia's Geforce 4 MX line a run for its money.

Since cards is still being readied but nearly finished, we cannot be 100 per cent sure about the clocking details that we are about to disclose, but we learned that there are going to be two versions of RV250 cards.

The first will be called the Radeon 8800 which may confuse many FireGL 8800 users. The Radeon 8800 will have 128MB high speed DDR memory that should work at 350 MHz or to say 70 MHz in DDR. For this extreme memory speeds ATI needs 2.8 ns RAM used in the Geforce 4 4600 that is theoretically capable of running at 714 MHz.

We have good reason to believe that ATI and its partners will use BGA memory packaging -- the same as it uses on the FireGL 8800 and Nvidia with its new old Geforce 4.

The second card will be called the Radeon 8700 and will be the same as 8800 except it will have 64MB of memory and will be significantly cheaper. [Less expensive, Ed.]

The core speed is likely to be 350 MHz on both cards.

It is still unknown whether ATI if going to show R300 at CeBIT and we are still unsure when this card will make it to market. µ