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ATI Technologies, a designer of graphics and multimedia chip solutions, is said to prepare the production of two new visual processing units this quarter that are expected to eventually replace the current high-end graphics processors from the company.

ATI Preps New High-End Chips

According to a high-ranking source among graphics card partners of ATI Technologies, the company preps to start making code-named R430 and R480 visual processing units in Q4 2004. ATI’s R480 and R430 products are expected to feature native PCI Express x16 connectivity and are said replace ATI RADEON X800 XT-series along with ATI RADEON X800 PRO SKUs in the segment. The source declined to reveal whether the chips are expected to be introduced or sold in volume in Q4 2004.

ATI’s RADEON X800 AGP 8x and PCI Express x16 product lineups are currently based on the chips internally called R420 and R423 respectively. At present ATI ships three RADEON X800 flavours for each bus into the channel: RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition, RADEON X800 XT and RADEON X800 PRO. The “X800” graphics cards distinguish by the different number of pixel pipelines enabled: the “PRO” version features 12 pixel processors, while both “XT” parts sport 16 pixel processors. The new R480 and R430 chips will allow ATI to diversify PCI Express “X800” product lineups and supply different chips for different add-in boards.

more @ http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d...005152127.html

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