Last Friday, at a press conference in San Francisco, ATI announced 10 new graphics chips under the Radeon HD 2000 family moniker: 5 for desktops, 5 for laptops. Most of the chips will ship in the June time frame except for the high-end one that will come on Monday May 14th as the Radeon HD 2900 graphics card. "We're going 8 to 9 times faster than Moore's Law in graphics", said Rick Bergman, SVP & GM of AMD's Graphics Products Group.

Here are some technical highlights for the high-end chip:

- 700 million transistors built on a 80 nm TSMC process

- up to 800 MHz on the GPU side;

- 512 bits bus to the graphics memory (first time in the industry) translating to 100 GB/s of memory traffic;

- 320 stream processors/shaders (think of it as small processing cores) similar to the Xbox 360 graphics chip now in a PC graphics chip;

- DirectX 10 and Crossfire (multi-graphics) support;

- HD requires 8 time the computational power than standard video. ATI has integrated a Universal Video Decoder (UVD) that provides hardware acceleration for the H.264 and VC-1 high definition video formats used by Blu-ray and HD DVD. According to ATI, with UVD, you'll have enough battery life to watch a 2-hours HD movie versus 1h20mns without it.