According to our sources, ATI may launch a faster modification of its RADEON 8500 next year, which work at higher memory and chip frequencies.
At present ATI RADEON 8500 graphics cards compete very successfully with GeForce3 family from NVIDIA. However, in the beginning of 2002 NVIDIA is going to launch its next product, NV25, which will boast higher working frequencies than GeForce3 alongside with some other improvements. ATI, however, doesn’t have the chance to respond to the NV25 launching with the announcement of its new R300 product yet, because their roadmap says that the development should be completed only by summer 2002. Nevertheless, ATI has already prepared some surprises for us and competitors.
According to one of our unofficial sources, in February 2002 ATI is planning to announce a clone of its RADEON 8500 working at 300MHz core and memory frequency. Now the company is offering two RADEON 8500 modifications: working at 250MHz and at 275MHz. But there is a number of facts proving that ATI has every chance to produce faster chips. First of all, the professional FireGL 8700 and 8800 graphics cards built on the same chips as ATI’s gaming cards support 300MHz chip frequency. Secondly, PowerColor Company mentioned the possibility to supply graphics cards based on ATI RADEON 8500, which would work at 300MHz core clock.
This way, ATI can undoubtedly produce 300MHz RADEON 8500 graphics chips. That is why the only obstacle here appears very high cost of the 300MHz DDR memory chips, which are also quite hard to find. However, this problem should be solved next year, so there will be nothing to prevent faster RADEON 8500 from coming out.
As for the names of the newcomers, they are supposed to be called following the same pattern as the professional accelerators: RADEON 8700 with 64MB memory and RADEON 880 with 128MB memory.