Tech site Level 5 claims to have access to leaked information about ATI’s R600, the next-gen GPU set to compete with Nvidia’s 8800 series. While R600 is expected to be released at the end of this month, there are no official hardware specs. The technical specs are:

• 64 4-Way SIMD Unified Shaders, 128 Shader Operations/Cycle
• 32 TMUs, 16 ROPs
• 512 bit Memory Controller, full 32 bit per chip connection
• GDDR3 at 900 MHz clock speed (January)
• GDDR4 at 1.1 GHz clock speed (March, revised edition)
• Total bandwidth 115 GB/s on GDDR3
• Total bandwidth 140 GB/s on GDDR4
• Consumer memory support 1024 MB
• DX10 full compatibility with draft DX10.1 vendor-specific cap removal (unified programming)
• 32FP [sic] internal processing
• Hardware support for GPU clustering (any x^2 [sic] number, not limited to Dual or Quad-GPU)
• Hardware DVI-HDCP support (High Definition Copy Protocol)
• Hardware Quad-DVI output support (Limited to workstation editions)
• 230W TDP PCI-SIG compliant

According to these specs, the biggest advantage the R600 will have over the 8800 is its full 512 bit memory controller, while the 8800 GTX only supports 380 bits. Also, a massive 1 GB of video memory, as opposed to some 750 MB in Nvidia’s 8800 GTX. Early benchmarks show the R600 ahead of 8800 GTX by anywhere from 8% to 42%.

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