AMD chats about the R600

Did any other industry trends make a noticeable impact on the technical design? 1920x1200 monitors (and larger) becoming more mainstream? HD digital media? Etc (feel free to add here)? If so, how did those considerations manifest in the silicon?

Changes occur all the time in our industry. Memory technology, interface protocols, new manufacturing technology, default resolutions, CPU performance and memory, HD-DVD/Blu-Ray, etc… We certainly focus on the appropriate ones for every chip. In the specific cases you mentioned, HD media and resolution increases, both of these were targeted in the HD 2000 series. The sweet spot resolution was re-targeted, and this led us to virtualizing all the compression and hierarchical memories used in the chips: On R5xx, we targeted 1600x1200 for compression and hierarchical Z; for R600, these are large caches now, capable of dealing with any resolution.