Digit-Life has published some information regarding ATI`s upcoming products. The information is not official, so do not take it too seriously.
R200 aka RADEON 2 chipset line looks as follows:
R200 - 4 pipelines, 250MHz core clock, 0.15 micron, DX8.1 support, HydraVision technology support. Samples will become available in May, mass production will begin in September. They say that there is a possibility to use AGP4X bridge to enable dual-chip configurations, but according to the official information from ATI, AMD HyperTransport technology will be used to provide multichip graphics solutions.
RV200 - 2 pipelines, 250MHz core, 0.15 micron, HydraVision. Samples - in May, mass production in September. Note, no word about DirectX8.1. compatibility. A bad sign then.
As we may learn from the statements above, ATI has chosen the same politics concerning inexpensive products as NVidia - the reduction of rendering pipelines. Basically, it is a quite radical method - the chip becomes less complex and that improves the yield so that the price is not high. Unfortunately, there is no information about DirectX 8.1 support by next-gen ATI cost-effective solution.
R300 series, which official name we do not know yet consists of three key chips:
RL300 - 4 pipelines, 0.15 micron, DX9 support, HydraVision. Early samples will be available by Q4'01. According to the recent information from ATI CEO, the next-generation core after R200 is developed by the same team, ho dealed with Flipper, GameCube graphics processor. Taking into account the fact that R&D of Flipper was completed in November, it is the extremely doubtful that this team can finish R&D of a brand new product by the end of this year.
RV300 - 4 pipelines, 300MHz core, 0.15 micron, DX9 support, HydraVision. Early samples - Q4'01
R300 - 8 pipelines, 300MHz (or higher) core, 0.15 micron, DX9 support, HydraVision. Tarly samples - Aug'01. It is too good to be the truth...
