There are quite a lot of interesting things when it comes to Ati's upcoming GPU, most of them performance related. And it's an expected thing for AMD to roll out such a monster since anything less would not resist an attack from Nvidia's 8800 series. No one is really sure what will the upcoming R600 perform but I have to say that the card is, at least theoretically, absolutely impressive.

First, keep in mind that the memory interface will be a 512-bit wide one. If you pair that with a maximum of 2GBs of GDDR4 Ram (it will actually feature 1 to 2 GBs of Ram so this is no mistake!) you'll get about 140GB/s of data throughput which will leave 8800 cards in dust. With a maximum of 86GB/s, 8800 GTX seems to be far away when compared to Ati's new toy.

The PCB is probably the most complex one ever used in the video card industry. It's a 12 layer one, a little shorter than 8800 GTX's but a lot "fatter". And so is the card since it houses the R600 and a total of 2GBs of Ram. Add up the cooling device and the power lines and memory connectors and you'll quickly realize that R600 will also be the heaviest card on the market. The "guilty" part in all this equation is actually the mighty quad heatpipe cooler produced by Arctic Cooling especially for R600. As the cooler and heatsink are actually integrated into the PCB in order to improve its structural integrity, the final card should look quite interesting.

A new Rage Theater 200 chip will be used to take care of the card's VIVO functions. As for the actual performance part, you may already know that R600 will integrate 64 unified shaders, similar to Nvidia's 128 stream processors found in 8800 GTX but far more complex. The unified shader units are 4-way SIMD capable, making them comparable to 256 real shader units. And that should be enough to challenge Nvidia again. On the downside, R600 can only manage 16 pixels per clock, making it slower than 8800 GTX but officials from AMD said that it won't be a problem since the actual frequency of R600 will be around 750MHz and will compensate this issue.

There's a lot more one can say about R600. For instance, it's going to be released on January the 30th and we all know that the date itself also holds a special meaning for Microsoft. Could it be just a coincidence? Hardly.