IF ALL goes as planned, ATI might steal a march on arch-rival Nvidia, and produce the leading high-end chip by the end of this summer.
We say 'might' as Nvidia might have its G80 ready before then. In which case it''ll be a whole different soupe de poisson.
ATI's R580+ uses the same 90 nanometre marchitecture as the cutrrent generation, but it will be modified to accommodate GDDR 4. According to ATI, the R520, Radeon 10K generation can also support GDDR4 but the company will have to tweak a thing or two to make it possible.
We still don’t know enough about the upcoming G80 but it looks to us that it should kick the current R580's butt and possibly even R580+'s, but we know that ATI plans to fight the new chip with its upcoming R600 monster.
We still don’t know the clock speeds for the new R580+ card, it's just too early for that. Give it a month or two.
