AMD to brand ATI Radeon 2000 series for HD era

AMD's 'R600' graphics chip will ship as the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series, the company has apparently revealed. Note the expulsion of the 'X'. The chip will contain 320 unified shaders and is capable of 24x anti-aliasing.

So claims website DailyTech, citing the vendor itself. The GPU can connect to memory across an eight-channel 512-bit bus. Unsurprisingly, CrossFire is supported through the usual two internal connectors.

The chip can do 128-bit high-dynamic range (HDR) rendering, the report claims, and supports 5.1-channel sound output through an HDMI port. Video handling comes through on-chip dedicated decoding and algorithm acceleration cores derived from AMD's Xileon TV chip family and dubbed Avivo HD technology.

The flagship HD 2900 board will be the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT. Below will sit more budget-friendly HD 2600 and HD 2400 series, based respectively on the RV630 and RV610 GPUs, it's claimed.

The R600 is expected to appear later this month after its last launch, set for mid-March, was canned at the eleventh hour. Arch-rival Nvidia is also expected to introduce a new top-of-the-line DirectX 10 card, the GeForce 8800 Ultra, later this month, possibly as early as next week.

The lower-end GeForce 8600 GT - set to go head to head with the Radeon HD 2600 line - is also believed to be imminent.