It has been a tough week for AMD. No sooner has Intel'sPenryn spin of Core 2 taken the wind out of Phenombefore it has even arrived, when Nvidia is having a crack at the RV670 update of R600 before that has entered the market, too.

Live and let dieshrink

The GeForce 8800GT, aka G92, is shaping up to be a realcontender in the mid range. Early benchmarks place it ahead of everything Nvidia has to offer except its premium 8800GTX andUltra products. Yet it will come in at a midrange price, similar to the 8800GTS320MB.

The 8800GT is clocked higher than a GTX, but only has 112stream processors and a 256-bit memory controller rather than the latter's 128stream processors and 384-bit controller. So it's swings and roundabouts forperformance. But as it uses 65nm production rather than 90nm, it will be much cheaperto make, and will have more frequency headroom.

R600 respun

However, things are far less clearly against AMD in thiscase, if at all. We still haven't had a chance to put RV670 through its paces,but it has far less ground to make up against Nvidia's 8000 series than Phenomdoes against Core 2. The ATI Radeon HD 2900XT sits somewhere between Nvidia'sGeForce 8800GTX and GTS on performance, yet almost matches the latter on price.

From what we know of RV670, it will be a 55nm version ofR600 with some extra enhancements, which will remedy some of the latter'sweaknesses. The biggest weakness of all for the Radeon HD 2900XT was its powerconsumption, and moving from 80nm to 55nm is likely to kick that into touch. Itwill be even cheaper to produce, too.

The graphics warcontinues

Next year is looking even more exciting, or at least what weknow of it. The competition between graphics vendors is so fierce that detailsbeyond the next month or two are usually very scarce, and made up of pureeducated speculation. With that caveat, here are a few possibilities.

On the one hand - or perhaps we should say in the formerlyred but now dark green corner - ATI has its next generation R700 due sometimein 2008. The rumours are that this will be a radical shift in architecture,away from big single graphics cores towards networks of lesser ones, with more coresin high-end products. The cores themselves will be based on R600, with one toeight cores depending on market segment.

We've seen both ATI and Nvidia continually trying to pushmulti-GPU configurations, with some vendors building this onto a single core.Now ATI will be making this its formal strategy, just as 3dfx did with theVSA-100 chip used in its Voodoo 5 cards (but hopefully with a bit morecommercial success...).

In the other, lighter green corner, Nvidia's next generationis even more shrouded in mystery, and potentially further off. However, Nvidiacould have some cards left to play with G80. There is some indication that theG80 design already has 160 stream processors- but Nvidia chose to ship with 128 enabled initially on the 8800GTX and 96 onthe 8800GTS. The G92 has just 112 enabled, even though it is essentially a dieshrink of G80. So future versions could have 128 or possibly even 160 streamprocessors.

As it's on 65nm, G92 and its derivatives will potentiallyhave higher clocks available in the near future, too. But in this respect,AMD's 55nm process has the upper hand, and 45nm should become available in mid2008 as well.

Battle royale

So although it's looking like game over for AMD's processordivision, the graphics business is going to be much more hopeful in both thenear and long term. In the run up to Christmas, a grand battle in the mid range(and highest volume) of discrete graphics appears to be on the cards, and wereally couldn't call it either way.

One Chinese website shows 8800GT ahead of RV670.But until we see it for ourselves we don't want to predict a win for Nvidiajust yet - particularly as AMD could well price its cards cheap enough tocompensate.