R580+ is ATI’s 80nm version of the R580 circuit and is expected to arrive a few months before ATI launch its next generation graphics circuit R600. Now it seems that there will be more news than just the manufacturing process, according to The Inquirer ATI might decide to use GDDR4 memory with this card. This would in that case be the first time we see GDDR4 memory used by a video card and considering that all of ATI’s circuits since the R520 sport GDDR4 through its specially designed memory controller this sounds more than likely. Today’s GDDR3 memory at 1.7GHz has bandwidth at 6.8GB/s, which you can compare to Samsung’s latest GDDR4 chip with a bandwidth at 12.8GB/s.
There is quite a lot to gain from moving on to using GDD4, especially since today’s graphics circuits have become so powerful that the memory bandwidth often become a bottleneck. GDDR4 will arrive soon, and the question is if R580+ will be the first to use the new memory technology. If so NVIDIA will have a hard time keeping up unless it has some other trump up its sleeve.
Source: The Inquirer
