With NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 295 announcement waiting just around the corner, the satanic rumor mill is in overdrive once again, fuelled by leaked specs and a vivid imagination, it seems. So what are we talking about? Well, several Chinese forums were a-buzz today with talk of a new RV775 chipset, alleged derivatives of the current RV770 marchitecture with some odd bits and pieces of additional technology such as smaller dies on the same process without a re-design, for example. This included a return to GDDR4 memory, with die sizes mysteriously shrinking on their 55nm process, and some extra stream processors and texture units. It just sounds a bit too much of scale really.- The Inquirer

ATI's Radeon HD 4900 Series Comes Maybe Soon-ish

The most interesting part of the posts was the one about AMD having refined the fabbing process resulting in better yields that would allow it to put out parts with lower redundancy, and that is just less silicon set aside for the eventuality of a manufacturing defect. This would mean some serious cherry picking taking place and a limited supply of cards at best, not to mention the economics of the thing. We rang up Chris Hook about this and he clarified several points about those specifications. But the general consensus is that someone compiled fragments of possible products and put them in a nice looking table.

While, in good public relation fashion, not admitting or denying anything we threw at him, he did help us figure out what's wrong with the information. ATI won't be launching anything in January, that's more or less guaranteed. And a refresh to the current range of cards will be launched over the course of the first quarter of next year, but not as early as January. Though CeBIT sounds like as good a time as any. That will include a delayed RV740 derivative and a suped-up RV770, which should receive the Radeon HD 4900 moniker. Also GDDR3 and GDDR5 will remain the memory bits and pieces, but ATI has dropped GDDR4 for good.

It is too expensive and too much like GDDR5, said the Cap'n. Now the juicy bit is that AMD has narrowed down the 40nm parts launch to the first half of 2009 too, so between the derivatives and the shrinks there will be plenty of options on the market next year. Last, but certainly not least, the Radeon HD 5800 series cards will be reserved for the last quarter of next year and will pair up with Microsoft's DirectX 11 launch. So fanboys and fangirls, you'll have to wait a while. There was more but we were sworn to secrecy and we'll keep it to ourselves.