There is a
Chinese website with lots of pictures of ATi's R600 core posted today that
are worth checking out. The shots show the R600 side-by-side with its
predecessor, the R580, and there are a couple of notable differences. For one,
the R600 looks to be about 17% bigger than the R580, even though the former is
based on smaller 80nm process technology. Considering the R580 sports around 384
million transistors, the size increase suggests the R600 has in excess of 500
million transistors-a number echoed by the Chinese site. The most obvious
change, compared to current ATi GPUs, is that the orientation of the chip is
rotated 45º and appears to be larger. According to
the folks at
TheInquirer, the rotation is required to shorten trace paths to video
memory. Previous rumors claim the R600 has a 512-bit memory controller and
support for up to 2GB of GDDR4 RAM, so the more exotic packaging might indeed be
a necessity. The Chinese website also claims that the R600 launch is scheduled
for January 20, 2007.
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