I must have been under a rock when this news appeared at The Inquirer, or maybe I passed it up as one of their more suspect stories... So thanks to APH Networks covering this rumour, other wise I might have missed it.

Anyhow The Inquirer reports:

We previously wrote that the chip will have sixty four Shader units but we never realised at the time that the design is actually built around a full sixty four physical pipes. That is what various high-ranking sources are telling us.

In this scenario, unless Nvidia also managed to triple its pipeline count in the upcoming G80, this chip could lose out big time when put against a 64-pipeline ATI offering.

The outcome is still uncertain as we don’t know enough about the G80 to make the final conclusion.

The R600 is scheduled for very late 2006, if all goes smoothly. And, if not, you might see this one in January - probably released by AMD's ATI.

At first glance this may seem like some great news for the enthusiast: a 64 pipe Radeon graphics card? Sweet. Sadly, this won't as impressive a card as one may first think; as the Inquirer forgot to tell the full story. The rumours of a 64 pipe R600 have been around for ages, heck even before the X1900 series came out. The thing is, the rumours state this is going to be a unified pipe design -- that means the 64 "real pipes" will be split to do different tasks. So for example the card should be able to use 48 "pipes" for shader processes and the other 16 for what normal pipes do...

Silly inquirer, it's almost like reporting the AMD ATi merger, then saying there is no merger, then claiming to be the breaker of the news... ho hum.