Video chips: the phantom war

While NVIdia should shortly announce their Geforce 7800, and as we already know almosta everything about it, The Inquirer now gives us information about the R520, ATI future GPU.
It will be engraved at 90nm, will decode H264, and will have 300 millions transistors. While it will feature a total amount of 32 pipelines, ATI will activate only 24 for a starter. The remaining will be activated on high end models, later on, except if NVidia GPU is more powerful. ATI will hence try and keep a margin out of commercial reasons, on top of keeping things easier during the manufacturing process.
The competition between the two brands stimulates innovation and power at an amazing pace. It's a shame Apple will never offer their high end chips at a similar pace...