It’s been known for some time that RV870 would be a shrink of RV770. The node following 65/55nm would be 45/40nm, but we weren’t sure if AMD would go to 45nm or directly to half-node 40nm. It’s now clear that AMD will go directly to 40nm and aim for a performance per watt ratio twice that of RV770. RV870 has been code-named “Lil Dragon”, which does indicate that this will be something small, yet something to fear.
The overall performance has been suggested to be somewhere around 20% better than RV770 with a significant drop in power consumption. This points to 960 shaders (192×5), 48 texture units, 24 ROPs and so forth. If this is the case, TDP of the RV870 should be around 150W at most with today’s frequencies. This is just an estimate on our part as technical specifications are still hard to come by. We also presume AMD to stay at DirectX 10.1 for now.
