The Inquirer recently put up the pics of the upcoming R600 chip by AMD—AMD’s first mainstream graphic chip. As you can see from the picture, the chip is rotated at a 60 degree angle, and is not the first time its being done. There are two reasons to it—one, AMD needed more space around the die for the resistors and second, to shorten the traces to the video memory as much as possible, in order to reduce the EM noise produced by the PCB.
When compared to the R580 chip, the R600 is at least 15 to 20% larger. This gives room for more transistors and at least half a billion of them are expected. Another thing to keep in mind is that the number of metal layers is also increasing letting you pack in millions of transistors more.
The R600 is expected to launch around 20th of January.
Yeah! Nvidia you are in trouble 
