ATI used the codename Spartan for R700, as someone got hot for the movie. At this time, there are no talks about any clock speeds but the brand should settle at Radeon HD 4870 X2 area.

With the introduction of the Phenom 9950 Black Edition, the top of AMD’s Phenom line is one peg closer to Intel’s baseline quad-core CPU, the Core 2 Quad Q6600. In our testing the Q6600 ran faster in games, while the 9950 and Q6600 traded blows in our media encoding and rendering benchmarks. The 9950 was faster in our HD video encoding test with Windows Media Encoder, but the Q6600 pulled ahead of the 9950 in Cinebench 10. As always with gaming tests though, keep in mind that most gamers don’t play at 800x600 with 0xAA/0xAF. The vast majority of you will crank up the screen resolution and graphics settings in-game; greater than 50% will also turn on AA/AF in most games (Crysis perhaps being the one exception). Under these conditions, CPU performance doesn’t matter, instead the GPU becomes the bottleneck. And as you saw in our benchmarks, the Radeon 4870/Phenom combo was just as potent as the Q6600/Radeon 4870 system.

We were asked not to do any benchmarks but we saw how the retail unit looks and that it looks fine enough to start shipping shortly. This XGP actually supports PCIe 8X which is more than enough to run vista and for the time beeing, you can run Lasso 3D on an external monitor but at later time you will be able to play lasso accelerated games on your notebook display.

Evaluation samples are schedule to be available in mid-July, and AMD will begin shipping reference design boards with 2GB GDDR5 memory at the end of the month, the sources detailed.

The company blamed the worse-than-expected results on weak global demand, and delays in ramping its new integrated graphics chip. Nvidia also cited price adjustments to its new line up of chips, due to competition from Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics group, which recently announced its own new product.