Xbitlabs has posted some more information regarding ATi’s coming VPU (Virtual Processing Unit).
It seems like that there will be three AGP-versions, X800 SE, X800 Pro and X800 XT, and one PCI-Express-version, X880 XT. ATi also seem to have chosen the same way as nVidia to limit the cards performance by simply reducing pipelines and frequncies.
The SE version will ”only” be available with 8 pipelines, the Pro-version 12 and the top of the line models, X800 XT and X880 XT, 16. The amount of memory seems to vary between 128MB on the lower end models and up to 512 GDDR3 memory on X800 XT and X880 XT. The cards will use a 128bit interface at varying speed depending on model.
An interesting question is of course if you can ”softmod” the SE and Pro-version and we will just have to wait and see.
Rumors state 5th of May to be the releasedate for X800 pro and approx. one month later for the rest.
Source: Xbitlabs
UPDATE:
Pictures from ATi Technology Days 2004 (taiwanese site)
