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THE BIGGEST and most closely-guarded secret about ATI's upcoming R420 chip, in either R420XT or R420PRO guise, is the number of pipelines the chip will use.
But now we can reveal that the R420 design features 12 working piplines from a possible maximum of 16.
The ATI R420 chip seems to be a heavily-tweaked R360 core, with added pipelines, built on a .13 marchitecture that allows the chips to run faster than ATI's current high-end chip milestone, a 412MHz R360.
As we previously said, the relative frequency numbers for this chip will be close to 500/1000MHz in its XT version; it will use GDDR 3 memory that consumes less power, and yet gives out less heat, than DDR 2.
Its all about the brawn this time, ATI says. And, with six vertex shader units, this chip ought to be very fast.
Despite protests, the outlook remains very cloudy for the upcoming performance crown battle between the R420 and Nvidia's NV40
Source:
The INQ!
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