A few days ago ATI officially introduced the Radeon 9700 as the fastest 3D chip. According to a variety of tests that have already been run on ATI's new baby, it truly does hand the crown to them beating all of nVidia's current chips. This of course can all change when nVidia introduce the NV30. Not much detail has been leaked regarding the specifics of the board. In a presentation in London ATI decided it was about time some info was given to the eager public.
The 9700 is built using 0.15 micron technology and carries an astonishing 107 million transistors.
The 9700 is built using a 10-layer PCB (Printed Circuit Board) which makes it very expensive to produce. ATI have received a lot of grief from many of their partners because of this choice but have stuck with that design in order to provide stability to a card which will be pushing its limits. What is more important to the success, financial and otherwise, of the card is the prospect of making it available in September. If this is achieved ATI will have gone a long way into becoming a serious threat to nVidia's domination of the graphics market.
ATI's presentation avoided giving a specific clock speed but suggested that 300+ MHz shouild be used. The most likely figure seems to be that of 315 MHz, which is the optimal limit for maintaining a stable R300 chip and Radeon 9700 card.
ATI will ask for USD 399 per card but will inevitably introduce cheaper boards based on the Radeon 9500 that will be an R300 with a lower clock-speed. The price of that range is estimated to be around USD 199 to 299. These cards should become available by November, 2002.
The external power connector on the card suggests that AGP cannot supply the necessary power for running this chip. During the presentation ATI claimed that the card will function without external power, provided the motherboard and power supply are state-of-the-art.
If availability problems are avoided it is very likely that ATI may have a GeForce killer on its hands.
