ATI has in an interview with the Chinese site HKEPC revealed some information about its 80nm manufacturing process where we’ve heard rumors of problems and delays. Edward Chow from ATI claims that ATI has already shipped a number of setups with 80nm GPUs from TSMC with good results. ATI’s engineers are currently working on tuning the last few details for the process and the first 80nm GPUs from ATI is expected to arrive during the third quarter of 2006. These will be budget and mid-range circuits, which is where ATI usually introduce new manufacturing processes. In the same interview ATI also replied to NVIDIA’s Quad SLI concept.
It claims that Quad SLI is still a pretty immature platform which only has an edge at really high resolutions and for this reason it is not a good economical solution. ATI has no plans for releasing a Quad Crossfire solution any time soon, but is working on improving its single cards and Crossfire performance. On the single card side of things it revealed that the R580+ circuit will be the first graphics card that will use the new GDDR4 technology.
