AMD AND ATI made a commitment and said to the world+dog that it plans to have R600 launched in Q1. It repeated these words just recently in front of so many faces.
We can confirm one more time that the R600 will be built on an 80 nanometre process and that it supports shader model 4.0 also known as the Unified Shader model. This means that the card is fully DirectX 10 compatible. ATI is happy to say that XboX 360 is its first Unifed Shader product and R600 is second generation. This is supposed to imply that R600 might learn the Unified Shader lesson better than Nvidia. But Nvidia's G80 still did the job first months before R600.
The chip supports HDCP and HDMI if you want, and is optimised for High Definition playback. The chip will decode Blu-ray or HD DVD. It doesn’t care about the media, a lot like the INQ.
Of course, the card supports Crossfire and as far as we know we are talking about cable less Crossfire. This is the first high end chip to support no external cable Crossfire and AMD is so clappy happy about it. Maybe Nvidia will now stop calling it MissFire.
Chip production is scheduled for February 2007 and we can confirmed that the final chips are about to see the face. Beta cards were wandering around the selected developers but those were DDR 3 while the final stuff has DDR4. Final launch with availability is March, I am convinced. µ
