TheInquirer reports that R600 has a secret weapon - an internal sound card. This is the one thing that Nvidia's G8x can't match, other than HDCP on dual-link HDMI. The ATI sound implementation is not GPGPU code. It is dedicated silicon, probably brought on by the Vista DRM infection and MS twisting arms to force it on people.  In any case, R600 will be compliant with the Vista requirements and can send sound directly over a HDCP/HDMI link. We are told this is a full HD sound setup, not a cheesy 2.1 channel thing. In contrast, NV G8x parts can't do this. They have to run an external cable from the sound chip to the GPU. This may not sound like much but it blows out several kinds of auto configuration and worse yet violates Vista logo requirements. One has to wonder if this is why NV can't seem to make a functional Vista driver six months in.

Nevertheless, it's unclear at this point whether this is an actual audio codec, or just some sort of pass-through for HDMI audio. I'd take a wait-and-see attitude until real cards are released...

In related new, Henri Richard, the sales chief at AMD, said in an interview that his company could have started to ship the long-anticipated code-named ATI R600 graphics processors (and cards) any time, but the world's second largest maker of x86 microprocessors decided to wait till the more affordable derivative graphics chips get to the point when AMD can release them commercially and then ship the whole lineup of DirectX 10-compatible products:

The R600 will be out in the second quarter. The reason we decided to delay the launch was that we wanted to have a complete DX10-enabled solutions top-to-bottom. A lot of people wrote that the reason it is delayed is because of a problem with the silicon, but there is no problem with the silicon. We are demonstrating it. We can ship it today. But if you think about it, looking at where the market is at, the volumes are going to be in the RV610 and RV630, so it makes sense for us to do a one time launch of the entire family of DX10 enabled products.