When AMD unleashes its new 40 nanometer DirectX 11 architecture we expect to see at least two models, Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850. These will be the equivalents to Radeon HD 4870 and HD 4850 that have been two of AMD’s best selling cards of the Radeon HD 4000 series. Once again we hear about the number of stream processors (shaders) of the Cypress chip, the GPU AMD is expected to use with its first DirectX11 cards. According to Charlie Demerjian at SemiAccurate it has been decided that Cypress sports 1600 stream processors. Something we concluded back in mid August already.
Sixteen hundred stream processors is exactly twice as many as the 800 we find in the RV770 chip of Radeon HD 4870/4850, which in theory puts Radeon HD 5870/5850 at twice the performance of the previous generation.
Clock frequencies remains unknown, but there have been talk of 2 TFLOPS performance, which means the that clock frequencies will most likely be at least 650MHz, but we expect AMD to tune these later on. While RV870 may very well sport other performance optimizations, on top of the increased shader count.
At the same time we should not expect twice the frame rates in games since there is more, much more, than the raw and theoretical performance of the GPU that determines the actual performance in applications and games.
But with 1600 stream processors in Cypress and 800 stream in the mid-range Juniper, NVIDIA will have a tough time keeping up until it announces the new GT300 architecture, which is not expected to happen before the end of the year, though expect demos soon in an attempt to steal some lime light from AMD.
With AMD’s Evergreen family around the corner the graphics card market is starting to heat up, and if NVIDIA doesn’t have a trump or two up its sleeve the coming months, I.e. Holiday shopping, could be rough for the green camp.
