IT'S NOW certain that if you want to see the R420 at CeBIT that you will have to sign a non disclosure agreement to enter an ATI secret and heavily guarded rooms.
The INQUIRER won't see this, as we don't sign these baleful documents. And anyroadmap, what's the point of being a journalist but now being allowed to write about it?
ATI told its partners that no one is going to get any R420/R423 cards because ATI wants to keep things very quiet before it's launched. Consider yourself lucky if you even see the RV380 PCI Express part at any ATI partner booth, but we guess that the Canadian firm will still have to give its partners something to show.
The R420 card -- powered with GDDR 3 and not DDR 2 as we previously said, even though GDDR3 is the same memory just clocked higher than 1000MHz -- is going to be a rare bird at the upcoming trade show.
ATI partners cannot be happy since they are spending serious money and still not getting any real stuff to show. The fastest that they will be able to show is still the R360, almost six months old and launched at the fag end of October 2003.
If our own Paul Dutton is right that Nvidia has 16 real pipelines, ATI might well lose the crown and the market share it seized from Graphzilla.
Let's wait and see how this riddle unfolds
Source:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=14433
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