The chaps over at Fudzilla report that ATI is working hard to release its R650 chip. The 65 nanometre chip is getting closer to launch day by day and aims for some high clocks. This won't just be a simple die shrink of an existing marchitecture as ATI plans to redesign some parts of the chip. The major architectural difference is that R650 will have more texture power as this was recognizes as one of the weakest points of R600. ATI aims for higher clocks, closer to 1,000MHz and obviously it will improve the usage of the available bandwidth. As the chip is going to be shrunk, you can expect significantly less energy consumption. All together this will be what R600 was suppose to be, a Geforce 8800 GTX / Ultra killer, but the problem is that Nvidia will also have something new by the time ATI finishes R650.

The R650's cards (Radeon HD 2950 XTX and HD 2950XT) should be available in August/September 2007. But can we really trust ATI in its plans? :-)