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.