ATI’s new upper end video cards are definitely on the minds of many hardware enthusiasts; however, they are even more on the minds of ATI-AMD’s manufacturing partners. The launch of these video cards, as is already widely known, has been in fact postponed a number of times. In the latest postponement, the launch was actually pushed back from March all the way to the second quarter of 2007. ATI plans to release these products to the press in the second half of April, therefore indicating that the debut of the new line of GPUs will take place in May.

The postponement of the launch of the R600 cards is having various effects on the market. NVIDIA, for one, also chose to postpone the launch of its new cards of the G80 family leaving its partners with an unchanged product line and preventing them from officially launching any new hardware this year at CeBIT. Comparatively, though, manufacturers of NVIDIA-based parts are getting the better end of the deal as they can still market GeForce 8800 GTX products as the “only DirectX 10 hardware available.” Manufacturers who solely use Radeon parts, on the other hand, don’t have any new technology to market or introduce.

The AIB (Add In Board) partners of ATI that we met at CeBIT had very little to smile about. They weren’t able to release any new ATI technologies, and for the most part, as you will see in the article, they weren’t able to release any novelty products other than a couple of passive cooled parts and new cooler designs. In the past, ATI has been repeatedly criticized for its inability to honor its own roadmaps. You might remember the postponement of the Radeon X1800 cards which took place during the fall of 2005. The delay made it nearly impossible for many ATI partners to introduce new products that could compete with NVIDIA offerings that were already a generation ahead.

The same scenario is being repeated with R600 cards now. Fortunately, though, these manufacturers are only being directly impacted in the upper end performance segment. The fact that NVIDIA has chosen to delay its G8x until after CeBIT is a stroke of luck for ATI-AMD’s partners as they can still keep on releasing mainstream/value Radeon parts that are able to compete with G7x mainstream/value parts in terms of price and performance.

At CeBIT we were able to see working R600 cards along with the mainstream RV610 and entry level RV630. Although we are not allowed to show actually pictures of the parts, we still want to discuss some of the details we observed.

Starting with the R600, we were shown a retail version of the card, which is smaller than the 12-inch one that was shown at CES. Interestingly enough, the retail sample we were shown had only a single PCIe 6-pin power connector, a definite plus for a card that is targeted at the upper end market segment. For some time now there has been widespread speculation of whether the R600 will use a 65nm process in place of the originally planned 80nm. Although we are not entirely sure, and it has not been confirmed officially by AMD, we speculate that AMD was able to reduce the power consumption of the R600 by moving from 80nm to 65nm, thus meaning they only needed to put one PCIe 6-pin connector on the card. In addition, use of the smaller production might have also allowed AMD to increase the operating frequency of the R600. As the cards still haven’t been released though, the information might change in the future. The card we saw running had only a single PCI Express 6-pin power connector, but it might have actually been a mislabeled RV630 (Radeon X2600). Without official confirmation though, at the moment only time will be able to tell what the final specifications of the board will be.

The R600 card we were shown is completely covered by the cooling system which is comprised of a plastic case that covers the fan and the heatsink. Altogether, the heatsink is not extremely large, another indication that AMD might have opted on using a 65nm process in place of the 80nm process which we were expecting them to use. Again, however, this information hasn’t been confirmed by AMD.

For the RV630, the mainstream card, there is no additional power connector. The card also comes with two Crossfire connectors on the top of the PCB, meaning it supports native Crossfire.

The card that caught our attention the most was the RV610, AMD’s next generation value offering that supports DirectX 10. The card we were shown was quite small and it didn’t require additional power connectors. The card will only support software Crossfire, and not the clutter reducing native Crossfire which many of us have come to appreciate. The card will be relatively low cost, partly because it might be using a 65nm production process, and also because of the rather simplified architecture that entry level video cards use.

We believe the use of a 65nm process will give AMD an advantage over NVIDIA’s G80 GPUs, which use a 90nm process, by allowing it to reduce its manufacturing costs and also allowing it to offer aggressively priced DirectX 10 solutions. The various Add In Board partners we spoke to also believed the smaller production process would work in the favor of AMD and play a pivotal role for the company in the next generation card battle. They were also quite enthusiastic of the market opportunities for the new cards.

At the present moment, all technical and architectural characteristics, along with performance, availability, and pricing of the R600, RV610 and RV630 will be revealed in two months. In addition, in May we will finally be able to get a clear picture of the DirectX 10 cards of every market segment. In the meantime, we hope that software developers will begin releasing the first DirectX 10 based games to allow us to fully take advantage of DirectX 10 hardware.