14 DAY TRIAL // The R600 will have high frequency and 64 unified Shader units (able to count 60 Shaders and some vertex information per clock). ATI hopes to get the final chip at a frequency higher than 700 Mhz. At this point, the exact frequency is not known, as the final silicon is still not out.
The chip is manufactured using an 80 nm technology, and after many delays, it?s now scheduled for February 2007, but more probably, it will arrive shortly after Vista. The 80 nm chips are little coolers, 17 % smaller, and can be slightly faster than the ones manufactured using the 90 nm process. It will be very hard for them to switch to 65 nm.
With all the delays, more and more things are found out. Just a few hours ago, The Inquirer stated that the chip will have 500 million transistors. Other speculated specs are the 250W power needed, which will make it probably one of the ?hottest? cards ever build until now, and a new cooler (obviously needed), that has to be better than the Arctic cooler. Also, 64 Shader pipelines (V4+Scalar), 32 TMU's, 32 ROPs, 128 Shader Operations per Cycle, 800 Mhz triangles/sec, 25.6 Gpixels/Gtexels/sec, 255-bit, 512 MB GDDR 4 at 1.8 Ghz, 57.6 Gb/sec bandwidth and WGF 2.0 unified Shader are speculated.
The currently fastest ATI, the R580+ (X1950 XTX) consumes up to 125 W with heavy duty 3D, while the dual chip GX 2 card can use 145 W.