"Turbulent. Tumultuous. Bumpy. Disappointing. There's no shortage of unflattering adjectives to describe AMD's journey through 2007, including their graphics division, ATI. Purchased just over a year ago for roughly $5.4 billion, the acquisition's long-term verdict remains to be written. In the meantime, the short-term outlook hasn't been rosy up to this point, with ATI conceding defeat in the high end GPU arena and instead focusing primarily on the budget and lower mid-range sectors, much to the chagrin of the ATI-loyal. That's about to change.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, ATI still doesn't have an answer for nVidia's flagship 8800GTX and Ultra GPUs, but with the release of the RV670 core, they're no longer relegating themselves to the lower end graphics market, and seem to be targeting the upper mainstream market with a vengeance."