We would like to share some interesting news from Taiwan with you. This time, it is all about ATI R300. Although this news story seems to be a bit less credible than the previous one.
According to Digitimes, the first engineering samples of this chip are reported to become available for the graphics cards manufacturers in the end of January already, and its mass production is allegedly scheduled for February. If the first part of the news can be regarded as something more or less possible, then the second one arouses some really grave doubts. ATI is known as a pretty slow company as far as the new product announcements go. Especially since there hasn’t been any credible info about this chip available yet, but the rumored specs look too impressive to be true, we should say. See yourselves: 8 rendering pipelines with 3 TMUs on each, 350MHz core frequency, 4 vertex shaders, etc… and all made with 0.15micron manufacturing technology! You will agree that it’s really hard to believe as the die size and the power consumption of this monster should appear really huge!
So, just bear in mind this info and do not take it too seriously. In fact, the only reason for this info to get in our news wire is its perfect correlation with the launching dates for another ATI solution aka RV250, which is scheduled for March (see this news story).