by Anton Shilov
07/07/2005 | 05:19 PM
A web-site has confirmed that volume shipments of ATI’s next-generation breed of visual processing units would begin in mid third quarter of the calendar year, which verifies ATI’s official claim that no revenue shipments of next-gen products would happen earlier than in August.
<%BANNER[article]%>ATI Technologies’ Taiwanese subsidiary expects to begin volume shipments of its 90nm graphics processing units (GPUs), the R520, R530 and RV515, in the middle of the third quarter, DigiTimes web-site reports. According to the company, late time to market of the R5-series was conditioned by “unspecified issues for manufacturing on 90nm technology”.
ATI’s R520 and R530 visual processing units (VPUs) are expected to be positioned for the high-end market, whereas RV515 chip is likely to be aimed on the performance-mainstream market. Sometime in early 2006 ATI’s high-end lineup is likely to be refreshed with code-named R580 graphics processor, which is more powerful than ATI’s R520 GPU.
“In the case of the R520 we have seen some delay. Particularly, we need to deal with a new technology at the high-end. It’s a combination of both architectural and [process] technology bring up. We have this well under control now. As Patrick described, we’ve taken a cautious position to not to consider revenues in our Q4 for our 90nm line,” said David Orton, the CEO of ATI, during a recent conference-call.
ATI code-named R5-series of VPUs is projected to support Shader Model 3.0 and other innovations, which requires a totally new graphics architecture from ATI. Still, general specifications of ATI’s R520 as well as its derivative VPUs are unclear at this time.