Introduction

Not long ago AMD announced their new HD 3400 and HD 3600 Series which are the follow up to the HD 2400 and HD 2600 cards. The HD 3650 from PowerColor we have on our testbench today is based on the RV635 GPU which is just an optical shrink of the RV630. An optical shrink is like you would put the chip's blueprint on a photocopier, set it to 85%, make the copy and then build the chip using the new plans. Ok, there are some bugfixes too, but nothing that will change performance of the architecture. What changed is the process size. By going from 65 nm to 55 nm, AMD can save some money on the manufacturing cost of each GPU.