ATI's R600 chipset is hot and late. But at least it will have high frequency and a total of 64 unified shader units. This means that in the best case scenario you will be able to count on roughly 60 shaders and some vertex information per clock. The best thing is the clock claim where ATI hopes to get the final chip at a frequency higher than 700MHz. At this point people don't know the exact frequency as the final silicon is still not out but the estimation targets at more than 700MHz. Quite a high frequency, that we also expected to see on the previous ATI core, namely the R580 but never made it that far. Although this time ATI might easily reach that goal. - The Inquirer

ATI's R600 chip to clock at more than 700MHz speeds

This chip is 80 nanometre and scheduled for January or February time. To try to be more corporate precise you should be able to buy one in Q1 of 2007 and it will probably come shortly after Windows Vista. ATI will struggle to launch it as soon as they have enough cards ready in production. This is still the weakest link in the hole launch process from ATI, while NVIDIA has managed to really streamline their launch with having the actual card on the shelves the same day. It still looks that the G80 chip from NVIDIA will be the first next generation chip on market. So once again a good start of NVIDIA who will be leading the way...