RV790 incoming

[Firestrider]

In order for AMD to remain competitive in the current and future market against Nvidia's GTX 270 and GTX 290 while waiting for TSMC to finish the 40nm process for their RV870 GPUs, they have decided to increase the clock speeds of the RV770.

This is more than just binning for the best of the bunch. They are reengineering to achieve higher clock speeds.

Story here: http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?75685

Could we see clock speeds of excess 1 Ghz with overclocking?

[don'tknow]

Yep, that must be the 4900 series.

The bigger question is, when will game developers make use of all this new hardware coming out end of this year/beginning of next year? PC hardware is getting even farther ahead of consoles (and it already is a good bit ahead), they really need to start developing some games for PC instead of making everything on consoles and porting it.

[Automiketic]

im just glad to hear they are putting out better and better stuff. that just means better benches! im not saying ill b the first inline to grab one but when i see one pop up in the classies.....who knows ;)

[Firestrider]

Yeah, it's kind of sad that the hardware guys have to do all the tweaks and driver support for their products when its really the software guys that need to do the work.

We can see how well code can perform when it is written well and optimized for a certain architecture with consoles.

How much theoretical performance does the RV770 have over Xenos in Xbox 360 now? I kind of wonder why ATI didn't just use the same architecture as Xenos in their discrete cards.

Apple has a plan with their locked down hardware.

[White_Pawn]

sounds good. I wonder if the cards will be faster clock per clock on top of the increased clock speed?

No dates though. Hopefully before christmas, that would give AMD some extra cash.

[Zurvan]

Looks a good strategy.....even if RV790 would do 15-20% better overall, this would keep Nvidia busy,maintain the cash flow and market position ; while RV870 is prepared for the ultimate threat in Q409

[moto211]

if RV790 gets a 512-bit bus i'll be all over it.

[BossBorot]

it would surprise me if the rv870 gets a 512 bit bus let alone the rv790. There is just no reason to add a 512 bit bus for AMD right now considering their goals in gpu design

[Firestrider]

Are the current 4870s bandwidth limited right now?

Maybe they could be when doing GPGPU operations, I dunno. Doubling the bandwidth when moving to a 512-bit bus would look nice on paper, but is it really needed?

Yeah, AMD is really bent on performance/watt and performance/dollar. That's probably the main reason they went with SOI for future Z-RAM.

[Zurvan]

RV790 is a 'refresh' of the RV770. It'll carry the same design with a bit of tweaking to improve clocks,ILP,maybe shader count and try to minimize power consumption(especially IDLE)
Also, if this is going to happen, it has to happen within 3 months timeframe. Since ATi is still going about releasing RV770 products (4850x2) , its better to guess somewhere in Q109.
It might as well get totally dumped if it fails to meet the deadline, or if G200b fails to threaten the current lineup

[Kuroimaho]

Can't wait to see these in action. Keep going ATI don't give them a breather.