The Inquirer says the R600 was originally designed for an 80nm node, but that 80nm R600 GPUs were "bleeding current like a slaughtered pig." AMD is said to have opted to scrap the 80nm R600 altogether and to move to the 65nm node. That may very well be the reason behind the company's decision to postpone the R600's release until the second quarter, even though AMD claims the launch schedule was adjusted to allow both mainstream and high-end R600-based cards to debut simultaneously. Nonetheless, The Inq says R600 mass production will be 65nm, and that the final chip will be able to reach core clock speeds of 1GHz "or even more."

At 1GHz this baby should be about 15-30% faster then the old unoverclocked 8800 and probablly a bit faster then the coming ultra. But then again NVIDIA still hasn't made its 8900 and is still using 90 nm if they leap to 65 who knows....