ATI's R600 To Have 64 'Real' Pipelines
Fudo over at The Inquirer reports that their sources are indicating ATI's next generation R600 flagship GPU will feature a full 64 physical pipelines. Looking at the current number of pipelines in NVIDIA's flagship cards, there is little doubt that the company's upcoming G80 GPU will need to have a healthy increase in pipelines in order to remain competitive. Unfortunately, little to no details are known about the architectures for either vendor's part at this time. As a result, it is nearly impossible to say either GPU will have an advantage over the other. One thing is certain though, ATI has raised the bar in terms of specs and is making a serious stride towards capturing the DX10 performance crown for the new year.
"In this scenario, unless Nvidia also managed to triple its pipeline count in the upcoming G80, this chip could lose out big time when put against a 64-pipeline ATI offering. The outcome is still uncertain as we don't know enough about the G80 to make the final conclusion. The R600 is scheduled for very late 2006, if all goes smoothly. And, if not, you might see this one in January - probably released by AMD's ATI."
