RV870, dubbed Lil’ Dragon, will be the first 40nm GPU from AMD. It’s slated for a summer launch in 2009. We expect the silicon to be taped out before the end of the year, but we don’t know the specifications. A lot of numbers have now been posted over at a German site, much like the first specifications of RV770 that turned out to be planted misinformation. Even though much of this seem reasonable we urge you to consider this information with a truckload of salt until we can confirm this.
Just the fact that this source claims that AMD wants the GPU ready for market in late Q1 makes us doubtful, but we still feel we owe you to forward this information. They claim a memory bandwidth of up to 150-160GB/s with possibly a 512-bit bus. The memory bandwidth may be near the truth but there will NOT be a 512-bit bus. There is no need for it with GDDR5. With 5GHz GDDR5 over 256-bit bus you get 160GB/s, which should be enough.
The overall performance is said to be around 1.5TFLOPS, which matches the first stories of a performance boost of around 1.2 times that of RV770. This points to four added shader clusters, with 40 shaders and 2 texture units per cluster, adding up to 960 shaders and 48 texture units. This was not stated in the article, but mere speculation on our part.
The last piece goes on to say that R800 will feature a MCM (Multi-Chip Module) solution with two RV870 dies under the same IHS. This rumor has been going around for long, and when they claim it is already made, we doubt it even more. On the other hand, it turned out that the rather poor specifications of RV770 turned out to be completely off and that the unfeasible information of 800 shaders turned out to be right…
