ATI's R520 to have 16 pipelines, launch by early October

Rumour mill The Inquirer heard ATI's R520 will have only sixteen pipelines. Earlier it was believed the R520 would have more pipelines but it looks like those will be reserved for the R580 which will come later this year.

Some of the chips will work at 700MHz or even 800MHz but yields at those speeds won't be satisfactory. Nevertheless, there is a good indication that overclockers will like this tech as will get them to run at sky high speeds.

Some R520 cards are already circulating and if ATI wants they could paperlaunch them right now, but it will still take until early October before they will be able to ship them.

Sources indicate the R520 will perform very close to NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX but it's not certain whether it will be faster or slower than NVIDIA's flagship.