Great !

Paper launch in March, product in June.

Anyway, likely to be the last ATi gasp at the very high-end of the graphics market; it was financed by pre-acquisition development $$. AMD cannot afford to continue to splurge many, many millions of $$ on developing the bleeding-edge graphics chips when the money is required now in the CPU race to catch up with Intel, plus pay the interest on the $2billion or so borrowed to buy ATi. Expect the ATi division of AMD to concentrate on multimedia chip-sets and integrated-graphics to leverage the integration of video with AMD CPUs; maximum return for each development buck. And expect nVidia to be the sole pusher of state-of-the-art graphics technology, since they can more than adequately finance their own development costs, plus effectively compete with ATi/AMD in terms of integrated and multimedia video ( and sound ). Expect nVidia licensing ties with Intel to get stronger, but AMD cannot afford NOT to have Nvidia as a chipset partner at the enthusiast end of the market.... a very nasty Catch 22 for AMD.

The acquisition of ATi by AMD was at the very worst time --- a dilution of AMD focus (and finance) from their CPU-knitting at the very time that Intel announced the real competitor for the AMD 64 series. The ATi acquisition is likely to turn out to be a mistake that will cost AMD very dearly. The acquisition of ATi was primarily driven by the lofty ambition to copy Intel in providing the complete core+chipset of a PC. No other good reason -- AMD was already excellently served by quality chipsets from both ATi and nVidia for many years. Totally wrong timing ---more appropriate in another year or two, only after concentrating all AMD resources on truly establishing technical and market dominance in the CPU market. The AMD management/board members that voted in favor of the ATi acquisition should all be fired. Since the ATi acquisition, the AMD stock price has fallen by more than one third and is likely to continue to fall until viable replies to the complete Core2 family are in volume production. The extra debt load from the purchase of ATi, combined with the rapidly eroding position of ATi in the desktop PC and workstation markets does not at all please the stock analysts.

The problemt hat your not seeing is it cost amd some4.5 BILLION to buy ati and they used so much cash on hand and went into debt to do it.

Exactly how can they make a profit off this? Ati is leaking money amd is getting hammered by intel.

And god forbid intel manages to open a 450 mm wafer fab plant soon. If that happens its game over.. UNLESS intel tsakes profits over crushing amd.

And concidering how much of the karet amd needs to pay off the debts and all... I realy doubt intelwill be nice..

Amd's mistake was waiting too long to design its own integrated setups. The result being there was no cheap company left. That forced them to spendvastly more money then they realy had and they are LATE.

By the time they do manage the product intelwill be cranking out chips on a 450 mm wafer fab line and amdwont be able toever catch up to that.

Its easy to forget how long a foot is, until you take a ruler and try to put it in your case and see if it hits something. Thats unbelievable. I have a pretty spartan mid-tower case. I just tried a 12" ruler in it and it hits the HDD cage in the front with about a half inch overlap.

Surely this is yet another BS "scoop" from the Inq.

I am an ATI Fan. My last Nvidia card was the Gforce 2MX but right now I'm getting tired of hearing R600. It's like: Hey, you wanna poop? R600! Are you hungry? R600! Did you read the article online? R600. You know what, bring out this R600 card so we can move on to something else. BTW I'LL BUY IT AS SOON AS IT'S OUT... AND IF I CAN AFFORD IT!

LOL! first gen hardware always makes me laugh at the designs. dx10 must really be worth it.

Does anyone seriously expect that thing to make a profit?

only cards i knew that beat that were used by Apple

http://www.lekrem.com/catalog/images//imagedrop/dealtime/p_475576.jpg
that's a 6800 ultra with dual link dvi.

I gotta say, 12" is a bit ridiculous. The 11.5 of the GTX is bad enough, but this is just insane. It almost seems too hard to believe, but if the specs are on point, I'd imagine they'd probably need this much space for all the power regulation. Oh well, I won't have to deal with it thanks to my lovely GTS :)

Edit: Correction, the GTX is only 10.5", which makes the 12" R600 even worse. Card lengths are definitely getting out of control.

Still, the XT, XL, and GT cards will reportedly all draw power through a new 8-pin PCI Express power connector, and the XTX flavor will require two 6-pin connectors—just like Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX.

This, as I mentioned in the related forum thread, is classic FUDo - the high-end R600 is using an 8-pin (up to 150W) + an 6-pin (up to 75W) + the PEG slot (up to 75W), for a max power consumption somewhere above 225W, but below 300W.

(for an explanation: 2x6-pin == 1x8-pin, both provide 150W @ 12V, therefore, going from a single 8-pin connector to two 6-pin ones, as Fuad suggests, is completely non-sensical)

I'll believe specs when the cards are released, or when ATI posts them.

Or, when someone like TR, HardOCP, or Anandtech says "We have the specs" rather than "According to this article at the Inq...".

This isnt good news. If these specs are right and the other specs are right this set of cards needs MUCH more spendy ram to get not much better perf then nv80 variants urreently out and LESS pref then the new 80nm nv80 varuants comming out in march.

I hope one of the sets of specs is way off..

a foot-long board? Geez...

i'm still waiting for the price points on those.

I do like the Inq though.