Kicker still on hold
We talked to a several ATI partners and it turns out that a new kicker
card is still on hold. At this time, ATI usually releases a 'kicker'
card, a faster version of existing architecture, but at this time they
still haven’t done it.
There are a few reasons and the most important one is that Radeon HD
5970 is the fastest card on the market and currently the only DirectX
11 dual-chip card. The second reason is that RV870 chip doesn’t offer
much overclocking space and even when overclocked it doesn’t deliverer
major performance increase.
Overclocked Radeon HD 5870 cards have been out for a months now and we
even tested some of them, but it looks like partners have tapped this
GPU already, and it has little more to offer.
Despite many believes ATI is still preparing a next generation 40nm
part to launch in late 2010 as 28nm from both Globalfoundries and TSMC
won’t be ready before first half of 2011 and even then its questionable
if they can pull some good yields.
Nvidia’s next generation GF104 chip is also planned for this summer,
but most likely the latter part of the summer, and this chip might give
ATI’s Radeon 5000 architecture a run for its money.
All in all, at present time we are not aware of any new cards that ATI
wants to add to its existing Radeon 5000 series portfolio.