Thursday, January 15th 2009
RV790 and RV740 Samples Surface, Specifications Gain Clarity
Some of the first batches, rather iterations, of RV790 and RV740 engineering samples have begun surfacing. Sources reveal bits and pieces of the new GPUs' specifications to Hardware-Infos. Being some of the first samples, these are merely iterations en route the development of the final product, though trend has it that preliminary information about AMD GPUs have a tendency of turning out true. We will exempt the RV770's final stream processor count from these.
The RV740, a mainstream GPU from AMD, is on course of becoming the first GPU in production, to be built on the 40nm manufacturing node. It carries 640 stream processors and a core clock speed of 700 MHz. It features a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory bus, churning out bandwidth that rivals equally clocked GDDR3 with double the bus width. The memory bus will be clocked at speeds between 800 and 900 MHz (3.2 GT/s and 3.6 GT/s). Products will carry 512 to 1024 MB of memory. The GPU houses 32 texture memory units (TMUs) and 8 raster operations pipelines (ROPs).
As for the RV790, surprise: it shares the same clock speeds as the RV770XT: 750 MHz (core) and 900 MHz (memory). The samples were equipped with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory with chips made by Qimonda. The memory bus width remains unchanged at 256-bit. With so much similarity with the RV770, the shader domain is all that remains to serve as the differentiation factor, apart from the newer manufacturing process that hypothetically facilitates larger overclocking headroom. There is no word on the remaining specifications.
Source:
Hardware-Infos
The RV740, a mainstream GPU from AMD, is on course of becoming the first GPU in production, to be built on the 40nm manufacturing node. It carries 640 stream processors and a core clock speed of 700 MHz. It features a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory bus, churning out bandwidth that rivals equally clocked GDDR3 with double the bus width. The memory bus will be clocked at speeds between 800 and 900 MHz (3.2 GT/s and 3.6 GT/s). Products will carry 512 to 1024 MB of memory. The GPU houses 32 texture memory units (TMUs) and 8 raster operations pipelines (ROPs).
As for the RV790, surprise: it shares the same clock speeds as the RV770XT: 750 MHz (core) and 900 MHz (memory). The samples were equipped with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory with chips made by Qimonda. The memory bus width remains unchanged at 256-bit. With so much similarity with the RV770, the shader domain is all that remains to serve as the differentiation factor, apart from the newer manufacturing process that hypothetically facilitates larger overclocking headroom. There is no word on the remaining specifications.
24 Comments on RV790 and RV740 Samples Surface, Specifications Gain Clarity
Hope this drops RV770 prices! I want a chepater 4870!
Thanks bta!
Hopefully, RV790 will put the GTX285 in its place.
Rv740:
640(x 2) x 700 = 896 Gflops (~.9 TF)
(128x3600)/8 = 57.6 Gbp/s
4850:
800(x 2) x 625 = 1TF (1000 Gflops)
(256x2000)/8 = 64 Gbps
I'll even make another prediction - at stock the 740 will outperform the 8800gt/9800gt but not the 9800gtx, it will reside somewhere in the middle. When overclocking is all said and done, the GT and 740 will perform similarly. The kicker - 740 will use 1/2 to 1/3 the power - Which makes sense since the die size will be ~1/2 of g92/b. That being said, 9800gt's can already be had for the $99 price tag 740 will likely demand.
As for 790 - I agree it's 960sp/48tmu or 20% faster than 4870. If it's 40nm, It's more-than-likely that 205mm2 chip that's been talked about by our chinese/thai friends. If you do the math on the shrinkage from 55nm to 40nm and add ~20% (obviously the memory controller and such is redundant, so slightly less) 205mm2 would make a lot of sense. Considering rv870 seems so far off and 205mm2 seems awful small for a "new" high-end part to replace the 256mm2 RV770, this could very well be.
If it's 55nm, I bet it's stockpiled rv770's with the redundancy activated (12 active instead of 10)...Anand's RV770 article in which he discussed the part with the engineers mentioned RV770 had redundancy built in, most likely so they could have both parts using the chip (4850/4870) to have 'all' arrays enabled.
Either way, be it faster or with less power, or both, I don't see it catching the 280, although it could be comfortably faster than the 260 (216), residing in a similar niche to rv740 will between 9800gt and 9800gtx. The $300 price tag might make for a hard decision against the rapidly dropping in price GTX280 though...granted, it again would be less than half the die size.
cheers everyone, its my first post,
hope we can share any useful thing..
Sorry :p