Advanced Micro Devices said on Thursday that even though its ATI Radeon HD 2000-series graphics chips family has experienced massive delays, the company is still positioned to deliver competitive graphics solutions to the market place. ATI, graphics product group of AMD, will concentrate on releasing “DirectX 10+” graphics chips next year as well as on improving the multi-GPU technology.

“In the enthusiast segment you can’t sit still. So, we will refresh Spider [AMD’s 2007 enthusiast platform – Editor] and will certainly bring quad-cores on 45nm in 2008, we will have a new enthusiast chipset and certainly we will have a new high-end GPU family as well in 2008 on the Leo platform,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of graphics product group, at AMD's Technology Analyst Day.

Unfortunately, not a lot of information is known about AMD’s code-named R700 graphics product family. What was released was that the new graphics cores will support DirectX 10+ capabilities, PCI Express 2.0 interconnection, ATI Avivo HD video engine, universal video decoding (UVD), DisplayPort connector as well as ATI CrossFire multi-GPU technology.

The new family of products will be produced using 55nm process technology, which is available already at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Therefore, if AMD executes itself flawlessly and does not tie together releases of new 45nm central processing units and 55nm graphics processing units, the new R700 family of chips may emerge already in the first half of 2008, something, which ATI needs crucially, as the latest two families – ATI Radeon X1000 and ATI Radeon HD 2000 – from the company emerged on the market considerably later than competing solutions from Nvidia Corp.