Hans Life Story~

The ATI Radeon HD 4000 series is slatedfor late Q2. Information about the high-end RV770 has been leaking ontothe web, from here and there, but the exact specifications has remainedin the shadows. German hardware site Hartware.net has gotten theirhands on what seems to be pretty authentic information. As far as wecan tell, it looks believable and matches the rumors going around.We're still far away from the launch and the figures are subject tochange. We also have some information on our own to share with you.

Ifyou're into extreme single-core GPUs you may want to stop reading now.ATI's future is value-oriented and if you're longing for that 1 billiontransistor megachip, you can stop doing it right now. ATI isn't intothat. We should have told you this sooner. ATI is focusing on bang forthe buck and if you want more performance you should get a second card,or get the card with two cores.

Considering the flexibility and scaling that CrossFireX offers,we're not exactly saddened by AMD's decision to steer ATI towardfocusing more on the price/performance ratio than on raw performance.It is harder to write drivers for a multi-GPU, but when you make surethat you have a good foundation, such as CrossFireX, it might be worththe risk.

The information published elsewheresuggests that ATI will use GDDR5 to a great extent, which surprise us alittle. On the other hand, ATI may know something about GDDR5 that wedon't (we would be surprised otherwise). RV770 has GDDR5 support, butwhether ATI will actually use it remains to be seen. GDDR4 with most ofthe high-end cards is a highly likely scenario. The frequenciessuggested here are actually lower than what good GDDR4 chips arecapable of.

RV770 will break 1TFLOPS, while the R700, with two RV770, should becapable of twice that, more than 2TFLOPS. This is higher than what hehad expected, but then again the core frequencies are also higher thanexpected. All cores are made by TSMC and their 55nm process. We'restill trying to hunt down more reliable information on the design ofthe "core".

On top of the information Hartware.net published we've completed thetables with some additional information, among others the target pricepoints. AMD/ATI's goal is to keep the prices at a point where they arefirst of all affordable, but also a thorn in the side of NVIDIA. Theprices in the table are the not the final MSRP, but the price ATI aimsto stick below. Meaning that the retail prices should end up lower thanwhat the tables shows.

When AMD/ATI, unveiled the Radeon HD 3000 series they had added anifty feature called PowerPlay. PowerPlay dynamically controls thepower consumption and will severely reduce the power consumption whenidle, but also reduce the peak consumption somewhat. When we look atthe figures they don't quite add up, but as stated above, these figuresare all most likely going to change before the launch. The idle powerconsumptions of all cards are extremely low and even the dual-coreRadeon HD 4870X2 will consume less than 25W when idle.

The number of TMUs have finally been increased, actually doubled, to32 with RV770, while RV740 sports 24 TMUs, and the low-end RV710 has 8TMUs. Don't bother getting upset with the 256-bit memory bus because itwill not become any kind of bottleneck. The only time it might be evenclose to that is when you're pouring liquid nitrogen into the containerand have the GPU running at +50% of stock frequency, which will happenthough.

To end this long and speculative post, we would like to say that ifnot all, most of the variables here are subject to change and should beconsidered with a "tiny" pinch of salt. We're still 4 month away fromthe launch.