Anton Shilov from X-bit Labs is reporting that the highly anticipated next gen chip from ATI is said to double performance compared to the company's current flagship Radeon 9800 Pro a.k.a R350. His report goes on that R420 still uses the same technology, which I think is rather unlikely. I doubt that the R3xx technology has this much headroom to be carried over as the base for R4xx hardware to double performance so be wary about Mr. Shilov's assumption. As we revealed earlier, it will incorporate 110 to 150 million of transistors and will support Pixel and Vertex Shaders 3.0. I expect the part to feature 8 rendering pipelines with 2 texture modules per each or 16 pipelines with 1 texture module per pipe. Its architecture will have much in common with the original R300 and R350/R360. Talking about manufacturing technology used for the R420, our sources said that the graphics processor will be made using mature TSMC?s 0.15 micron fabrication process which seems to be enough for modern VPUs.