Good news from the AMD crew as we kick off 2008, hopefully the first step towards a successful year to make up for their hellish 2007 period.

According to the Inquirer AMD's next-gen R700 GPU has already been taped out; possibly up to a few weeks ago in fact. Some of us wondered if we'd ever see it arrive this year at all, let alone making it to this stage already.

We'll know more about it within the next month or two.

A FEW WEEKS ago, a bunch of people suggested that the ATI R700 would be delayed because it won't appear on official platforms until much later. This was the worst case of roadmap misreading I have seen in a long time, made so much more laughable by the fact that it had already taped out.

Yeah, R700 is in the process of being fabbed now, or at least its components are. The component thing is a story for another day, the part that matters is that R700 bits are in the oven now and things appear to be going swimmingly, or at least skatingly if you know what Toronto is like in the winter.