ATI to launch R580 and RD580 together?

ATI is planning to launch the R580 GPU (Radeon X1900) and its RD580 chipset at the same date, The Inquirer believes.

It's expected the ATI Radeon X1900 will feature 16 pipelines and 48 pixel shaders and the RD580 will feature two by sixteen PCI Express lanes.

The motherboard is a step forward from the one just reviewed here, RD480 based board. It now has enough lanes to power two PCIe graphics cards at its native 16X working mode and it will make Crossfire even easier. I still think that ATI will have to stick with a master card concept, but as you know the mainstream Radeon X1600 and entry level X1300 can work in Crossfire without master card.

Both products are expected in late January or early February, and it will likely be a launch with world wide availibility.

On the other hand we can also expect NVIDIA to launch its G71 GPU by early February.