First 80nm chips from ATI expected October

[Alpine]

Divide and conquer

ATI MISSED its original plans by a quarter and it won't introduce any 80 nanometre products until the beginning of Q4. And we hear it's all on track for September production and October availability.


ATI plans to attack Nvidia with its two mainstream chips, RV570 and RV560. Both feature twelve pipelines but there will be some clock differences. The RV570 is made by TSMC, while the RV560 comes from UMC and is expected to run at a slower clock.

RV570 targets a 600 to 650MHz core clock speed and it supports the 256-bit memory interface. Depending on the card supplier, you will be able to use up to 512MB of memory on this card. The board supports GDDR 3 16M x32 136 BGA memory of various speeds. This chip is aimed to give Nvidia's very successful G73, 7600 GT chip some heat.

RV560 will clock at 450MHz, just like the RV570XL, but the RV560's advantage is that it needs only six-layer PCBs. All RV570s need eight-layer PCBs. The RV560 could be ready earlier but ATI will hold its horses and launch the new refreshed line at the same time.

the INQuirer