ATI's next generation DirectX 10 core will end up with more than 500 million transistors. We already told you that this will be one big, hot chip but we don't think many people expected +500 million transistors. This is just a single piece of the puzzle of unveiling this big crazy chip. Don't forget that we heard will dissipate +250 watts of power and will also be really fast in both DirectX 9 and 10 games. We hope there won't be any additional delays of this hot chip, which will be the first big and powerful graphics chip unveiled by AMD. Due to the acquisition of ATI by AMD and all that goes with it, the R600 chip has been delayed lately and it would be good for AMD/ATI to move forward. - The Inquirer

ATI's R600 core has over 500 million transistors

Unlike the upcoming G80 chip from NVIDIA, there has been already quite some details available on the R600 chip by ATI. Although the R600 is hot and late, at least it will have high frequency and a 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.