ATI's R580+ is 90 nanometres after all

ON a low quality screenshot you can easily confuse the number eight and nine and that is exactly what happened. After a more detailed shot I actually learned that we all made a mistake claiming that the next generation ATI's graphic card will end up as a die shrink.

Well it won't. We learned from a multiple sources that the next R580+ is still 90 nanometre. It won't be a die shrink at all but ATI will redesign the chip and make it more powerful than it is now.

This probably implies a bigger die and a higher clock all with the goal to beat the Nvidia's offering. The rest of the information stands. It is still a Shader Model 3.0 card with Avivo support, native PCIe and a Crossfire support as well. You will still need to bridge this card but this will be the last one that will need an external connector.

Samples should be ready by July time while ATI hopes to starts the production and selling those cards sometimes in August. We hope that R580+ can be significantly faster than both G71 and R580 as it will have to fight against upcoming G80 chip. µ