As we were told by our source, there will be two RADEON 9900 branded graphics cards available later this year. Obviously, the parts will be called as the RADEON 9900 and the RADEON 9900 PRO. Both products should be based on the famous R300 architecture with certain changes in the hardware of chips. Moreover, a source indicated that there may be two different chips for the RADEON 9900 family.

ATI RADEON 9900 VPU will be manufactured using advanced 0.15 micron copper fabrication process that should allow the graphics chip to be clocked at 375MHz for core and memory. It was already noted by a couple of journalists at The Inquirer that the superior 256-bit memory bus by ATI will remain untouched, but I cannot tell you for sure which type of memory will be used on the RADEON 9900 powered graphics cards. Take into account the fact that besides copper interconnections in the chip, certain optimisations may be made in order to boost the performance; nevertheless, architecture in general should not be changed much from the RADEON 9700: the same 8 rendering pipes with 1 TMU per each. This one will be unveiled at CeBIT and will be available almost immediately after the trade-show head-shooting the arch-rival GeForce FX 5800 Ultra.

ATI RADEON 9900 PRO will be made using 0.13 micron technology and will be hugely more powerful than the brethren. It was said that the part will contain 8 rendering pipelines with 2 TMUs per each in addition to more efficient architecture of the VPU itself compared to the original RADEON 9700. The RADEON 9900 PRO may be announced at CeBIT, but do not anticipate ATI to start selling the babe just after the launch as it is not easy to develop a 0.13 micron graphics processor. With more TMUs and higher core and memory clocks ATI wants the RADEON 9900 PRO to compete against the NV35 due this Summer, but since ATI is ahead of NVIDIA in general, they are also likely to be faster than them in particular and start offering the RADEON 9900 PRO this Spring.

ATI have not yet specified the prices on their forthcoming products. Keep in mind that almost all news-stories that reflect the information from inside the company are fully preliminary and may eventually become obsolete as companies usually adjust their roadmap and family of products based on the market situation.