While ATI Technologies is yet to release its lineup of RADEON X1000 products early in October, some reports claim, the company may already have its future high-end component with cranked up specifications code-named R580 “in house and working”, according to a slide that presumably comes from an ATI’s presentation.

Asian web-site HKEPC has published a slide entitled “ATI’s 90nm Technology Advantage” that should describe the company’s success with 90nm process technology. According to the slide, not only code-named R520, RV530 and RV515, which are about to ship under RADEON X1800, X1600 and X1300 names respectively, but also R580 – which is believed to be a faster incarnation of the R520 – is “in house and working”. The slide also claims that the products are “ready for Fall shipments”. 

While the date the slide and appropriate presentation were made on is unclear, provided that the slide is genuine, this is the first time when ATI officially talks about refresh of the yet-to-be-released high-end product lineup that sports DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0, a new memory controller and other innovations.

ATI reportedly taped out its code-named R520 component in the Q4 2004, but then had to delay the commercial introduction of the product for several times due to insufficient yields of chips at high clock-speeds.

Typically ATI refreshes its high-end and mainstream product lineups two times a year, but this year the company did not unveil any new products in about ten months after the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition was introduced. But if the company did not fail to deliver its R520 product in June, late this year it might introduce an updated version of the part.

In 2003 the company’s arch-rival NVIDIA Corp. formally rolled-out its GeForce 5900 Ultra (NV35) component a couple of month after it actually released its highly-anticipated GeForce 5800 Ultra (NV30) product due to the fact that the more advanced graphics processing unit was more competitive.

ATI did not comment on the news-story. Genuineness of the aforementioned slide could not be verified.