ATI secretly released its Silver Bullets material to AIBs this week and the picture of R580 is slowly coming together. R580, or Radeon X1900 as it is called internally, is expected to "launch" in January according to ATI documentation. Unfortunately, ATI's track record has not been spectacular with the last few product launches. ATI's Crossfire chipset "launched" twice, once in June and again in October.

ATI released their Silver Bullets for Radeon X1800 approximately two months before the launch of the card, but it took nearly six weeks after the launch for master card variants of the X1800 to show up on store shelves (and nearly as long for Crossfire motherboards as well).

The Silver Bullets presentation was a little light on details, but did confirm the R580 GPU has 48 pixel shader processors and higher clocks than R520 (a.k.a. Radeon X1800). Radeon X1900 uses a 90nm process also found on Radeon X1800. The internal briefing also confirmed that there will be two separate versions of the card, RX1900CF "Master Card" and RX1900 "Crossfire Ready" card. Like the Radeon X1800 series, you will need at least one master card to enable Crossfire support. Avivo and Shader Model 3.0 will also appear on Radeon X1900.