[geRV]

Well the x800 series was plagued by crap yields which hampered availability. The r520 core has been up and running for a while now (since before e3) they had some of them at e3 as well. The whole reason the cards not been available was because of poor yields and obviously ati didn't want a repeat of the x800xt-pe fiasco so they held back and waited untill the 90 nanometre process was giving them an acceptable amount of cores per wafer.

Hows this ati's first time maiking a core btw? The original radeon was ati designed as was the 8500. The r300 core was designed by a team from artx which was bought by ati but its still an ati core seeing as theyve been integrated into ati. The 8500 core has basically lasted untill the x850 series. Far as i know its basically the same design with extra pipelines bolted onto it and the core shrunk in size over time.