Are AMD/ATi Planning To Release A Radeon HD 4900?

According to my favourite PC enthusiast magazine’s website, CustomPC.co.uk, another tech website, Hardware-Infos has claimed to have spoken to a source who has revealed a detail or two about a new AMD/ATi GPU codenamed RV790.   Supposedly it will feature more stream processors than the current HD4850 and HD4870 GPU’s (which each have 800).   Hardware-Infos don’t reveal the exact figure,but did mention that the new chip “will not just be a half-hearted frequency update”.

Now, being little more that just a rumour it’s difficult to say weather or not this is going to lead to a new product in the near future, however in November last year (2008) AMD confirmed that it was going to contract TSMC to build GPU’s using the 40nm process that it’s new facilities are capable of.

CustomPC go on to mention that Hardware-Infos also say “AMD has another 40nm GPU planned for March, which is codenamed RV740. This has also been discussed on other sites in the past, including Nordic Hardware. According to the rumours, the chip will have 640 stream processors, 16 ROPs and use GDDR5 memory”.

So, could this lead to a new ATi Radeon HD4900 series card?  To be honest, this news doesn’t interest me a great deal personally, because I lost faith in ATi products long ago…plus the Nvidia logo is so much nicer!  But are there any ATi fanboy’s out there that are truly excited the possibility of ATi jumping ahead of Nvidia with an even better chip?  Is this ATi’s plan to stop playing catch-up, and jump ahead of Nvidia in the graphics card contest?  Please leave your thoughts below.