R870 to sport 2000 shader processors?

[Andreas G]

We're nearing the launch of the AMD R700 series. It's slated for the middle of June and the first chip will be the RV770, which will be the heart of both the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870. Later this fall we will also see the arrival of Radeon HD 4870X2, which incorporates two of these chips on a single PCB, the high-end card of the Radeon HD 4000 family. Even though none of the cards have been officially unveiled yet, rumors of the next generation have already surfaced. Although is doesn't say much, a story over at Chiphell claims that AMD is aiming for 2000 shader processors with the next high-end card, R870, which should also be a dual-GPU card, meaning 1000 shader processors in each of the 40nm (?) RV870 GPUs.