AMD remains secretive about their R600 but we still managed to dig out a little more information. We can expect to see R600, RV610 and RV630 demos @ CeBIT but no performance tests to be revealed there. The R600 launch is slated for end of March it appears now and there are 3 SKUs; XTX, XT and XL. ATi briefly mentioned to their partners a 2nd generation Unified Shader Structure and a new hardware Crossfire for R600 family which can be bridgeless yet faster. We are not sure how does this new HW CF work out yet. The retail card is half an inch longer at 9.5" and the OEM/SI version remains the same at 12". It comes with 512-bit memory bus and 1GB DDR4 at more than 2GHz frequency. Core clock remains a mystery as yet.

We have gotten some concrete information on the RV610 and RV630. The card samples will start appear in March and the launch slated for April timeframe. There will be 3 variants of RV630 supporting DDR2, DDR3 or DDR4. For low-end RV610, it will be built on 65nm process and there are 2 variants; RV610LE supporting DDR2 and RV610PRO supporting DDR3. Memory clock for RV610LE stood at 400Mhz while RV610PRO is at 700MHz.

We have gotten some concrete information on the RV610 and RV630. The card samples will start appear in March and the launch slated for April timeframe. There will be 3 variants of RV630 supporting DDR2, DDR3 or DDR4. For low-end RV610, it will be built on 65nm process and there are 2 variants; RV610LE supporting DDR2 and RV610PRO supporting DDR3. Memory clock for RV610LE stood at 400Mhz while RV610PRO is at 700MHz.

DAAMIT is not that far away from launching its mainstream and entry level DirectX 10 products.

Nvidia will beat it with its G86 and G84 launch but we heard that AMD plans to introduce the mainstream R610 and entry level RV630 in April. This will roughly take place a month after the original R600 launch. Give or take a week or two, more likely give.

Those will be crippled versions of the original R600 design, but they will be good for Vista and DirectX 10 and that’s what AMD desperately needs. Despite the April launch, mass availability is expected in May 2007. This is still not that bad as at least AMD will be there well ahead of the back to school period.

The R630 will bring the AMD's DirectX 10 to the sub $100 market and this is exactly what AMD sales need.

The good thing is that the ad-on market is set to grow in Q2 due to Vista. A lot of people will have to upgrade to run this eye candy.

THE DRIVER FOR the R600 appears to indicate there will bet at least four different versions of the card.

"R600" = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9402
"R600 " = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9403
"R600 " = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9400
"R600 " = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9401

DAAMIT is still uncomfortable using any names due the leaking problems and each of these cards has its driver, for secondary display. We don’t know the difference between the cards, uet.

One industry source implied a possible XTX, XT, PRO and GT branding, but we cannot confirm this. This bit puzzles us.

[ati2mtag_R600.GeneralConfigData]
MaximumDeviceMemoryConfiguration=512
MaximumNumberOfDevices=4

There are two possibilities. The first is that each card supports 512MB of memory only and that you can Crossfire up to four cards. The second is that the card has four different memory devices and can address up to 2GB of memory. We still don’t know the answer but will tell you when we do.

"R600 Secondary" = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9421
"R600 Secondary " = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9422
"R600 Secondary " = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_9423
"R600 Secondary " = ati2mtag_R600, PCI\VEN_9420

The cards are about a month away from a public announcement.