Originally Posted by Akuma

That's exactly why this is ATI's first core. ArtX designed the first one and ATI bought it/them. R520 is a supposedly completely new core started from stratch. Add in the fact that moving to 90nm fab is VERY hard. Both AMD and Intel had a very hard time getting there from 130nm. This will also be ATI's first card to use full fp32 instead of fp24. They are packing too much stuff into this tiny new core: 32 pipes, fp16 HDR with AA, and SM3.0. All on a brand new process that they aren't familiar with... Recipe for disaster, IMO.