Tuesday, July 28th 2009
Radeon HD 4860 in the Works?
AMD released the industry's first 40 nm desktop GPU. The RV740 went on to make only one SKU, the Radeon HD 4770. The company filled its Radeon HD 4700 series almost overnight with two more SKUs positioned on either sides of the HD 4770, based on the 55 nm RV770/RV790 GPUs instead, due to stock shortages. These also impacted on the inventories of the HD 4770, which forced AMD to reposition the Radeon HD 4850 in the sub-$110 segment, creating a bit of a void between it and the roughly $150 HD 4870. If anyone of you is up for yet another ATI Radeon SKU, here's one coming your way: Radeon HD 4860.
The Radeon HD 4860 seems to have been already taped out, sampled, and pictured by sections of the Chinese media. At the heart of it is the RV790 GPU in a different configuration codenamed RV790GT. It has 640 stream processors instead of 800 on the HD 4850, except that it uses a 256-bit GDDR5 memory interface, and effectively higher clock speeds. The core is clocked at 700 MHz, and the memory at 750 MHz (3000 MHz effective). The PCB pictured shows the card to powered by a single 6-pin power connector. It is expected to be positioned in at the $130 price point, and in theory, competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce GTS 250.
Source:
IT168
The Radeon HD 4860 seems to have been already taped out, sampled, and pictured by sections of the Chinese media. At the heart of it is the RV790 GPU in a different configuration codenamed RV790GT. It has 640 stream processors instead of 800 on the HD 4850, except that it uses a 256-bit GDDR5 memory interface, and effectively higher clock speeds. The core is clocked at 700 MHz, and the memory at 750 MHz (3000 MHz effective). The PCB pictured shows the card to powered by a single 6-pin power connector. It is expected to be positioned in at the $130 price point, and in theory, competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce GTS 250.
92 Comments on Radeon HD 4860 in the Works?
I guess crossfiring this with a 4870 would be like crossfiring a 4830 with a 4850 (same family/mem type, but different core speed/stream processors). Should be interesting to see what AMD's partners do with these.
Btw, looks kinda "clean" (positioning of vrm's and other parts).
What I'm looking to see is cards with same/more processing power, but lower power consumption, smaller PCBs and less heat, like a Radeon HD4850e, HD4860e, HD4870e & HD4890e, that would have 25% less wattage & PCB.:rockout:
All this means to me is that ATI has the time to waste -- if they're replicating the (shady) practices of nVidia's marketers, maybe it means their market share is equalizing. :laugh:
That being said, I thought the 4850 already "competed" against the GTS 250/9800GTX?
Where AMD messed up is trying to rank the cards by performance. Yeah, it kinda works, but with people interested in energy-efficiency, heat output, and size more than ever, plus the jumbled up pricing, it's not as easy a market to shop as they intended for it to be. What you really want is to have is to have your lineup tiered by the core they use, but with harvesting in full swing as the AMD camp scrambles to sell off old chips (a smart move, don't get me wrong), even that's a hard way to structure things. You could set them up by the number of stream processors (like it used to be with pixel pipelines in the old days), but like I noted towards the top of the post, a lot of the time a 640P screamer will be faster and more efficient than an 800P beast running a lower clock.
So yeah, I agree that this is a bit ridiculous, but looking back I can't honestly say that the end of any other generation was ever any less confusing. AMD is selling off old stock, and that's good. With the number of HD2/HD3 series cards still on the market, I can only imagine they've learned a lesson or two on this stuff from the past.
4860 will have less performance than 4850 or more?
4860 ??<---
4870
4860 ??<---
4850
4860 ??<---
4770
4830
I put this list together to make sense of things and came out making no sense at all! :laugh: