Advanced Micro Devices, the company that supplies 25% of the world’s x86 microprocessors that has been making inroads into graphics technologies business since it acquired ATI Technologies in late October, 2006, demonstrated the delayed code-named R600 graphics boards at a conference and said it would introduce the board along with its derivatives made using 65nm process technology.

“We pushed out the launch of the R600 and people thought ‘it must be a silicon or software problem, it’s got to be a bug’. In fact, our mainstream chips are in 65nm and are coming out extremely fast. Because of that configuration, we have an interesting opportunity to come to market with a broader range of products,” said David Orton, the former chief exec of ATI who now leads AMD’s graphics product group.

Earlier AMD already notified its partners and media that it planned to delay the release of the code-named R600 graphics chip, but did not provide any approximate timeframe for the commercial launch of graphics boards based on the R600. However, a document presumably sent to AMD’s add-in-card partners, revealed that certain versions of R600 graphics cards would reach the partners only in late March, days before the quarter ends.

While it was generally believed that the reason for the delay was ATI’s intention to develop an R600-based board to compete against Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 320MB graphics card. However, right now it is claimed that the company plans to align the launch of the R600 made using 80nm process technology with the launch of DirectX 10-supporting products made using 65nm fabrication process, which code-names are RV610 and RV630.

“Instead of having them separate, we thought, lets line that up, so we delayed for several weeks,” David Orton is reported to have said according to ExtremeTech web-site.

In a bid to prove the existence of R600, AMD demonstrated at the press event in San Francisco, the so-called “Teraflop in a Box” system running a standard version of Microsoft Windows XP Professional that harnessed the power of AMD Opteron dual-core processor technology and two next-generation AMD R600 “stream processors” capable of performing more than 1 trillion floating-point calculations per second using a general “multiply-add” (MADD) calculation, according to AMD.