AMD isn’t far off from announcing its first 40nm DirectX 11 graphics circuits, but we now hear that there is a new 55nm graphics card coming. The card would be based on the RV790 GPU, the same chip used by Radeon HD 4890, but stripped down and renamed RV790GT, and the card would then be named Radeon HD 4860. As the name implies it lands in between Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870, and it does it in a quite different manner.
Radeon HD 4860 namely has only 640 stream processors, compared to the 800 shaders of the other two cards. To keep up appearances and remain faster than HD 4850, AMD has equipped the card with 256-bit GDDR5 memory bus and graphics memory operating at 750MHz (3000MHz effective), while the graphics circuit is clocked at 700MHz. With a price around $120 the card should cover the lower mid-range segment quite well.
Graphics card | HD 4850 | HD 4860 | HD 4870 |
|---|---|---|---|
GPU | RV770, 55nm | RV790GT, 55nm | RV770, 55nm |
Shaders | 800 | 640 | 800 |
GPU clock | 625MHz | 700MHz | 750MHz |
Memory | GDDR3, 256-bit | GDDR5, 256-bit | GDDR5, 256-bit |
Memory clock | 1986MHz | 3000MHz | 3600MHz |
The card has already made an appearance in China and when it reaches outside of Asia remains to be seen.
