ATI started the 55 nanometer series with the RV670, continued with RV770, and both chips marked success. Rumors say that the company plans to move the fabrication process directly to 40nm with its next generation chip codenamed RV870. All of us would have expected the die to shrink to 45nm, but it seems that we will see graphics processor manufacturing technology smaller than that of CPU's for the first time in history. Intel uses the 45nm for its CPUs, AMD will do the same by the end of the year, and there are little chances to see that die going smaller too soon.

ATI's RV870 will come with more transistors and with boosted clock speeds, but there are no specific details on the actual architecture of the chip. The new GPU is expected to arrive in 2009, and some even say that it might arrive before one year passes from the RV770's debut. Since the 40nm process could prove to be a tricky one, it is too early to get a fixed date for the chip's arrival.

The 2009/2010 time frame announces itself to be a fruitful one when it comes to the graphics IT industry. Beside the RV870 chip from ATI, 2009 is also likely to bring to us Intel's Larrabee 'visual computing' technology. The company has already announced its plans to launch Larrabee sometime at the end of the next year, or the beginning of 2010. There are a lot of suppositions spinning around Intel's multi-core graphics processor, since it has been stated by the company that it is supposed to differ from what we know graphics cards to be.

Intel said that Larrabee would also support games and video applications like any other card, but that it is actually intended for programming. Still, the company has a lot of work to do on the drivers' part, even if the hardware comes up right. There are many games that require the driver support to work smoothly; otherwise, end-users won't come near Larrabee.

On the other hand, 2010 is rumored to bring to the market some other new cards from Nvidia and ATI as well. The green company is expected to launch its GeForce 11 graphics cards series, and some say that we might see even two series launched during that time. As for ATI, the RV970 generation of GPUs is rumored to come during 2010.