EVEN THOUGH ATI doesn"t want us in Canada without signing one of its famous NDAs, we always have our ways of getting information about its future plans.
Back at CeBIT we heard that new chip will be called X800 but simply could not confirm it at that time and we also heard that this chip will be introduced at System Builder Summit. The date that is apparently being suggested is the 5th of May, and it could be that ATI will launch this chip during the SBS event.
Sources close to ATI claim that it can actually ship this card at the same day of launch and we know that there are quite some samples ready as we speak. As for the specs, the R420PRO or should we call it X800PRO will be clocked at 475 MHz, 25 MHZ higher then we suggested since yields are better, while the memory will be clocked at 900MHz as we suggested before. Everything is packed into 180 millions of transistors and the card has 12 pipelines as we suggested. The R420XT, Radeon X800XT will be higher clocked card with 16 pipelines which came as a huge surprise to us.