While the old Radeon HD 4000 series specifications have started to recirculate, we’re hearing that the RV770 has reached the production stage. The high-end RV770 is still slated for Q2 and should slide in and move the RV670 down a peg or two. Prices are going to be more or less the exact same as today, which means highly competitive. We’re eager to find out if the yields we’re hearing about are true, because they are almost too good to be true.
The old HD 4000 specifications are a bit off, but not completely. RV770 builds on the R600 framework and it seems that RV770 will have 480 unified shaders. RV670 has clusters of 16 shading units, and each units have five sub-units that do the actual work. Although, it’s more of a 4+1 design, where the fifth can do more things that first four. This will remain, but there will be more 10 more clusters (160 shaders) and twice as many TMUs, up to 32 units.
This also means that we’re likely to see the same antialiasing performance as with RV670. The frequency will not be as high as we’ve reported in the past, but up to 900MHz. Overclocked versions should be plenty.
The question is what will replace R700, because when NVIDIA launches GT200, AMD will need something completely new to counter with. We’re digging…
