A while ago I attended a conference led by Chris Hook himself -- PR Manager of ATI Technologies. While it was explicitly devoted to R580 architecture, Chris started off with R520 and its lateness. While we have been aware of it for quite some time, he went on and confirmed that the majority of chips did not pass high clockrate tests because of random failures in silicon. Once the problem was narrowed down to 3rd party IPs incompatible design, GPUs started to yield proper clockrates.

The late introduction of R520 had caused ATI to speed up the introduction of its new products. Going by how the company handles kicker products, most of us assumed it would be just that; a refresh of the older SKUs. All in all, it was a hasty and wrongful assumption. ATI had been actually cooking something tasty for us – R580 which has been in production since November 30th 2005.