There's been endless speculation about when cards based on ATi's much-delayed R600 graphics processor might eventually turn up but, essentially, it's been just that - speculation. However, courtesy of the intrepid and ever vigilant William F Deeplung IV, we can report - exclusively and definitively (or, should that really be somewhat speculatively?) that V-day is going to be R-day for us P-people.
Translation?
ATi is targeting February 14 - Valentine's Day - for getting R600 review samples into the hands of the press.
And, just in case you were under any doubts. Yes, we do mean next Valentine's Day, not the year after next.
But will we love it or loathe it? Or just have to say nice things about it, so it doesn't burn our dinners?
Who can say? Whatever the case, if we don't get to go hands on until mid-February, you can be sure that the move to full production is going to be later still.
Willy boy reckons that we should expect there to be a month or more in between times.
That, of course, is logical enough since it brings us to a launch time-frame that co-incides with Europe's top computer show, CeBIT, the Hannover exhibition kicking off on March 15 and running through to March 21.
But, even though CeBIT is still over three months away, we're expecting limited R600-based supplies and tight allocations to begin with.
This, of course, wasn't how things were supposed to have played out.
ATi's had its problems - as variously discussed today already in Beanz eminating from Willy's reports from the ongoing HEXUS Dragon Tour 2006 of the far east.
The problems have not been helped by the hard pace NVIDIA has set, getting its performance-leading G80 GPU finished and out the door in a rather more timely fashion than its would-be rival.
This nugget about dates could be wrong. But, though Willy's not perfect (he's kind of overweight and a little short, for a start) he's not often been caught out in the past - and let's, please, not mention that time with the chambermaid, the Alasatian dog and the Coldstream Guardsman!
If, however, he's right once more, the worry for ATi - and it could turn into a major challenge - is that, three months or more down the line, NVIDIA may well have its speed-bump for the G80 ready to roll, or close to it.
This, our Willy speculates, could be an 80 nanometre part going under a radically-different name - G81.
As a little diversion, you might like to know that while double-checking the correct form for nanometre (it's nm, as Willy's electrionic emaily message had said), we stumbled upon these three sweet sentences on Wikipedia:
Historically, the metre
was defined by the French Academy of Sciences as 1/10,000,000 of the
distance from the equator to the north pole through Paris. Now, it is
defined by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures as the
distance travelled by light in absolute vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a
second. This is approximately the distance from floor to navel on the
average barefoot man.
