ATI's first 40nm cards are taped out and we can confirm that the cards are up and running. A11 is a pre-production silicon that goes out usually before A12, the production one, and our sources confirm that the card is in good shape.

This is a transitional product and it will help ATI to get easier from 55nm to 40nm and we learned that it should end up faster than RV770PRO, Radeon HD 4850 card; but its job is to compete Nvidia's Geforce 9600GT, and it completely leaves it in the dust.

The card does use GDDR5 from troubled Quimonda, and ATI is playing with IDGV1G-05A1F1C-40X GDDR5 at 900MHz. We still believe that the card has a 256-bit memory interface and with GDDR5 memory, this looks like a powerful combination.