September 8^th, 2004 (12:00am) - Today, gamesindustry.biz reported that ATI’s CFO Terry Nickerson spoke at the Smith Barney Citigroup 2004 Technology Conference in New York this week.

The significance in this is that while making his speech to other colleagues and investors, he made this interesting comment: "The other one that’s starting to become, I think, a factor when you’re looking at it from an investment point of view, are game consoles," he told the conference. "We’re actually winding down development on some of the Microsoft product. Both Nintendo and Microsoft will be royalties."

Now I know this can be interpreted in any way you can think of, but the most viable and realistic explanation is that Xenon’s GPU is finally at the end of the road of its development stage. This coincides with the recent rumors of Xenon’s 2005 release date because the developers could start recieving more advanced development kits as early as december 2004, enabling them to port over and optimize the coding for the console, allowing games to be ready as early as november 2005.

While this may seem enticing, the most logical release date for next generation console is still set in 2006. We will have more on this as it becomes available.