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ATI's new secret weapon is the R420

Daniel Fleshbourne Administrator Neowin @dfleshbourne · Jun 14, 2003 06:05 EDT with -1 comments

AFTER ATI INTRODUCES its late summer speed update, codenamed the R360, we can reveal today that it is set to make a significant change to eighteen months of R300 architecture. The R350 and R360 are just speed bumps of existing architecture with some features enabled, but the technology called R420 is a totally new architecture. We're still trying to fathom what happed to R400 and why ATI has codenamed its next generation technology the R420.

The R420 is being developed under the project name Loki, named after the Norse deity, son of Farbauti, held responsible for fire and magic, and able to take numerous different shapes. Loki was also held directly responsible for the death of the god of light, Baldur. The R420 will be a PCI Express chip and at this time we can only wonder how many transistors it will have, but we have every reason to assume more than 110 million and probably less than 150 million.

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