Toss away all the rumors you've heard, ATI's new flagship is nothing more than a higher clocked, slightly enhanced version of the R300 core. If you'll remember back to our original overclocking investigation with the R300 you will recall that we were able to clock the 0.15-micron R300 core at an impressive 400MHz, very early on its production cycle. We had an idea of what the R350 would be back then, and to all careful readers, you knew about the core well ahead of today's launch date.
When a GPU is designed, the entire chip is actually "written" in a programming language known as a HDL (Hardware Description Language); basically, the HDL code is what defines everything that goes into the chip (click here for a more thorough description on how GPUs are made). For the R350, ATI made only minimal changes to the code behind the R300.
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