Introduction

Today is the launch of the long anticipated AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2. This card features two RV770 graphics processors on a single PCB. The RV770 has been used on the HD 4850 and HD 4870 in the past. Another product announced today is the Radeon HD 4850 X2. The HD 4870 X2 uses GDDR5 memory, while the 4850 variant uses GDDR3. Compared to the single GPU designs, both X2 cards feature twice the available video memory per GPU. The HD 4870 X2 has 2 GB of GDDR5 - 1 GB per GPU. AMD is positioning their HD 4870 X2 as "the fastest graphics card on the planet" - which is reflected in the price of $549.
Sapphire's HD 4870 X2 follows the AMD reference design specifications to the letter, the only difference is the Sapphire sticker on the cooler.


One novel feature of the HD 4870 X2 is that it has an additional direct-GPU-to-GPU interconnect called CrossFire Sideport (XSP). The XSP offers an additional 5 GB/s interlink bandwidth between the GPUs but is not enabled at this time. Yes, you read correctly. The official reason why the XSP is disabled at this time is because that much bandwidth is not required with current applications and it will be enabled at some point in the future via driver update.
One major advantage of the XSP that I see is that transfers between the GPUs would have a lower latency. The Gen2 PCI-E bridge will certainly be fast, but it will take a short time to process the incoming data and send it out to the other GPU (<140 ns). With the XSP's point-to-point interlink this delay is eliminated. So my speculation is that AMD is working on using the XSP feature but the driver support simply doesn't work as intended at this time.