14 DAY TRIAL // Since September, Samsung kept on announcing about how GDDR4 was going to be the next-best-thing in IT. And I proudly use the word "since" because Samsung's GDDR4 wafers from where GDDR4 chips first emerged were in many cases either faulty or simply not working as they should. And then came Nvidia's G80 equipped with GDDR-3 (384-bit wide). Meanwhile, Ati continued to develop the R600 product line keeping alive both the GDDR3 and GDDR4 lines.
It seems that the future equals GDDR4 since Ati has recently announced that along with the R600 line, the Stream Processor 2 line (GPGPU board based on R600) will only support GDDR4 memory chips. The name for the new Ati graphics board is still unknown but it's beginning to be quite clear that both products will rely solely on GDDR4. And that will surely translate into two things.
A projected 2GB GDDR4 R600 will probably be even more expensive than a G80 based one. And then there's the problem of availability since 2GB GDDR4 monsters will force the memory producers to supply a larger quantity of chips. And since GDDR4 is only at the beginning of its time, this could easily turn into a great GDDR4 shortage.
No other details about R600 are available. Rumors claim that the final chip is rotated at 45 (not 60 as it was originally presumed) degree angle in order to keep the memory traces as short as possible. Moreover, R600's back could end up with a G80-style DIN-DVI-DVI and with the HD output connector located at the top of the PCB, not in the middle as it was with the older x1950 series. Lots of good news, except for one: the R600 was postponed until February. Reasons are unknown but that seems to be no problem for DirectX 10's users since Nvidia has some problems herself with a working DirectX 10 driver for Vista slatted until December the 15.