After ATi intoduces its late summer speed update, codenamed the R360, we can reveal today that it is set to make a significant change to eighteen months of R300 architecture.
The R350 and R360 are just speed bumps of existing architecture with some features enabled, but the technology called R420 is a totally new architecture.
We're still trying to fathom what happed to R400 and why ATI has codenamed its next generation technology the R420
The R420 is being developed under the project name Loki, named after the Norse deity, son of Farbauti, held responsible for fire and magic, and able to take numerous different shapes. Loki was also held directly responsible for the death of the god of light, Baldur.
The R420 will be a PCI Express chip and at this time we can only wonder how many transistors it will have, but we have every reason to assume more than 110 million and probably less than 150 million.
PCI Express is a major technology scheduled for Q2 2004, and Intel's Grantsdale chipset will support this new wave in computing.
ATI is aiming to launch cards using the R420 around Comdex/late November, but this will really be a paper launch as we can't expect cards that early, although we can expect samples.
Production and market availability of the cards is scheduled for Q1 2004.
How will ATI solve the problem that this chip will be PCI Express based, and all that you will be able to buy until Q1 2004 is AGP 8X at the best?
The answer is that ATI is going to develop a PCI Express to AGP bridge, so it will work with existing AGP platforms and still work when PCI Express boards hit the market.
We expect that either R420 will get its new PCI Express brother in Q2 next year, or else ATI may introduce new technology to bump the speed up.
We can now confirm that the card will have hardware support for both PS 3.0 and VS 3.0, to give developers more programmability and it will be able to achieve feats that NV35 and R350 is incapable of doing.
As for memory we are still not too certain about the details, but GDDR2 seems like a fair bet to us.
As for frequency it is just too early to say.
source | the inquirer
