At last, some good news from AMD

Jeremy Laird
04 Oct 2007 12:48 GMT

It's all been a bit doom and gloom at AMD of late. Both its big
launches in 2007, the Radeon HD 2900 series graphics chips and its new
Barcelona quad-core CPU architecture, have flirted with outright flop.

But if recent rumours of a killer new midrange graphics chip from
graphics division ATI are true, there's hope yet for AMD.

As we reported earlier today, the new chip (codenamed RV670) promises
to be more or less as powerful as ATI's existing flagship, the Radeon
HD 2900 XT. Crucially, all 320 stream processors from the 2900 XT are
present and accounted for. But thanks to the use of a much finer 55nm
production process (the 2900 XT is an 80nm design), the new chip is
much smaller and therefore much, much cheaper.

The use of a simpler 256-bit memory controller is apparently to only
concession ATI has made. But this in turn makes for a less complex PCB
and in turn adds further to the video chipsets overall affordability.


In fact, that production process could allow ATI to actually clock the
chip higher than the 742MHz of 2900 XT. Figures north of 800MHz are
being mooted. If so, and if the final video boards come in under £200
as expected, well, RV670 will be the funkiest affordable graphics chip
by far.

New weapon of choice

Indeed, the card will almost definitely be the new weapon of choice
for value-conscious gamers. Existing affordable midrange DirectX 10
video boards like the NVIDIA GeForce 8600 or ATI's own Radeon HD 2600
simply aren't cutting it in the latest DirectX 10 games such as
BioShock. They only offer around one third the rendering oomph of a
high end video card.

What's more, unless I'm sorely mistaken, NVIDIA has nothing in its
upcoming roadmap to match RV670 for both price and power. OK, NVIDIA
does have a new midrange part of its own, probably to be sold under
the GeForce 8800 GT moniker.

But word is that board is somewhat cut down rather than a simple die
shrink of the full fat GeForce 8800 GPU offering around two thirds the
performance. In other words, AMD should have an outright winner on its
hands.

It's also worth noting that RV670 looks extremely suitable for use in
notebooks. Currently, neither ATI nor NVIDIA has managed to squeeze a
high performance DX10 chip into a laptop PC.

Actually, RV670 looks so good, you have to wonder what role will be
left for the bruiser that is the Radeon HD 2900 XT. It's a big old
beast on 80nm, pricey to make and extremely power hungry. If RV670
really is essentially a die shrink minus the 512-bit memory bus, then
the existing 2900 XT will only offer an advantage when paired with a
monitor running silly multi-megapixel resolutions.


http://www.tech.co.uk/performance-pc...-news-from-amd