The Inquirer reports that ATI has an R580 successor built on an 80nm fab process in the works. The chip will apparently be a die-shrunk R580, its purpose likely being to increase clocks and decrease production costs for the red team in the face of competition from NVIDIA's 90nm GPUs. Indeed, while the current R580 is already 90nm, its die area adds up to around 314.5mm², compared to only 192mm² for the 90nm GeForce 7900 GPU. The shrunk R580+ should begin sampling in May, with production to begin between June and August.
Meanwhile, the Inq thinks ATI's next-gen R600 GPU will likely have to wait until the end of the year. Similarly, they're claiming NVIDIA's upcoming G80 core missed tape-out a few weeks ago, and should now show up at "roughly the same time" as the R600, possibly in the early fall.
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