Vikingod

Speculation over the arrival of ATI’s next high end chip, to replace the tardy R520, has been rife over the past few months, with the popular theorists pinning towards a late January 2006 timeframe. ATI’s recent conference call for their Quarter 1 financial results more or less confirmed the theories with CEO, Dave Orton, stating “Over the next 90 days, you will see us recapture the performance leadership from ourselves, with our R580 launch in Q2, delivering the most compelling multi-GPU graphics platform with CrossFire, and ramping OEMs with this solution in the quarter as well.”

In that statement Orton not only singles out R580 but Crossfire for it as well. Crossfire has been on a rocky path since its announcement with Radeon X850 Crossfire being very late and not at all well received, although the recent X1800 Crossfire release has ironed out some of the kinks, although a few still remain. However, with R580 coming within the next month or so it raises the question as to how much uptake X1800 Crossfire will have and how much support the platform is going to receive. Given R520’s late introduction and the impending arrival of R580 in relation to the Crossfire variant of R520 it may be the case that the Crossfire system really only gets serious on its third incarnation – even then its quite possible that the hardware to provide the solution is still evolving, and may continue to do so for some time.
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Read More / Source: Beyond3D

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