14 DAY TRIAL // ATI decided to postpone cards based on the RV570 and RV 560 cores. Those are ATI's first 80 nm cores and nVidia already beat ATI by shipping its 80 nm mobile chip, the Geforce Go 7700. It also seems the RV570 based Radeon X1900 GT and RV560 based X1650 XT cards will be pushed back for a month and will launch on the 17th of October.
The RV570 has 36 Shader units and should cost around ?199 at launch date, while the RV560 has 24 pixel Shader units, twice as much as the RV530 and RV535, plus 600MHz core and 1400MHz memory, showed The Inquirer.
Yesterday, ATI had announced that another card will be delayed, the R600. From the competitors, the G80 was also said to be released soon, but the launch was postponed to early November.
There seems to be some "conflicting info" regarding the R570 (according to Neoseeker), with reports describing both a 128bit and 256 bit memory interface on the X1900 based GPU. It will likely feature 12 texture and 36 pixel shader units putting it on a par with an X1900 GT should it use a 256 bit interface. The R560 is expected to feature 24 pipelines and 8 texture units over a 128 bit bus, putting it in competition with the 7600 GT. Seeing as there's a good chance that R570 cores will be identical to currently available X1900 GT boards in all but core designation, hopefully, ATI can work out the driver requirements to make such a setup work.
I think these delays are actually a good thing. I wouldn't want to spend money on a board that has "bugs", so if that means I'll have to wait a little more and (maybe) pay less, that's fine with me.