According to this German web-site, ATI is about to announce another chip from the Radeon family, Radeon 8500 XT. It will be clocked at 300MHz (Radeon 8500 - at 275MHz, Fire GL 8800 - at 300MHz) and will support dual-display configurations. Graphics cards based on Radeon 8500 XT will be equipped with 64MB or 128MB DDR SDRAM clocked at the same 300MHz.
Radeon 8500 XT will be officially announced at CeBIT 2002 in Hanover, mass shipments are scheduled for March/April. Apparently. this will be ATI’s riposte to the GeForce4 family from NVIDIA to arrive in February. But isn’t the riposte too weak? Well, ATI is known for never rushing to launch really new chips. We won’t be surprised if R300 will be released not in spring (as it was expected), but around June and shipments will start in autumn (i.e., like it happened last year with R200 aka Radeon 8500).