AMD seems to be on to a winner in recent months. In September 2009 its graphics arm, ATI, released the DX11 Radeon HD 5870 GPU. A neater, cleaner design than the decent Radeon HD 4000-series, the £300 card is our choice for readers looking for a high-end gaming card that has practically all the bases covered.
A week later, the company released the trimmed-down Radeon HD 5850, ostensibly the same GPU but with reduced clock-speeds and a slight snip of the architecture. Move forward again by a couple of weeks and the mid-range Radeon HD 5770 and 5750 filled out the £100-£150 space.
NVIDIA, AMD’s only rival in the discrete GPU market, appears to be focussing efforts elsewhere, with its next-generation Fermi architecture, designed to compete with Radeon HD 5870, being pushed farther back into 2010.
As AMD and NVIDIA are all too acutely aware, designing GPUs is an inherently expensive business, so Intel has ‘lent’ a helping hand by agreeing to pay AMD $1.25bn (£750m) in damages, primarily due for engaging in some rather naughty business practices on the chip giant’s part.
However, things aren’t as rosy as they could be. General stock of Radeon HD 58×0 cards is abysmal, to say the least, and, focusing on a niche market, the Radeon HD 5870’s claim of being the best graphics card in town can be disputed by the long-in-the-tooth NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295.
Set against a backdrop of high-end GPU wars, AMD has readied the graphics card that it believes will hold the performance crown for a while to come. More of a show pony than pragmatic volume-earner, we welcome the Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB.
Let’s delve into AMD’s GPU roadmap to see where the new GPU fits in.
AMD wants to position the DX11 architecture from $75 through to $599, and it’s using the same basic design to do so. Please head on over to here to see how the architecture provides a scalable solution.
We will see sub-$100 5000-series cards in a couple of months’ time, codenamed Redwood and Cedar. They will likely replace the current Radeon HD 4600/4700/4830/4850 cards.
Pertinent to today, at the very top of the picture is the Radeon HD 5970. It is a dual-GPU card that uses a mixture of HD 5870 and HD 5850 technology.
Radeon HD 5970 – what’s in a name?
Previous dual-GPU cards from AMD have been identified with the suffix ‘X2′ – Radeon 4870 X2, 4850 X2, and 3870 X2 being obvious examples.
In the numbering game that’s been played by three major PC-related manufacturers – Intel, AMD, NVIDIA – the suffix has been dropped in favour of a higher model number. We know that AMD was toying with this idea last year, almost calling the HD 4870 X2 an HD 4970, but now it’s official.
Twin-GPU monster
The following slide shows how AMD has created this juggernaut of a card, codenamed Hemlock.
As we alluded to earlier, the new card is a pastiche of the two single-GPU Radeon HD 58xx cards. The basic setup is double that of a Radeon HD 5870, evinced by the (combined) 3,200 stream processors, 160 texture units, and 64 ROPs.
However, the frequencies of the card are those of the lower-clocked Radeon HD 5850. The vagaries of computer performance (frequency x shader) and texturing mean that the 4.64TFLOPs and 116 GTexels/s are more than double a HD 5850’s, thanks to the underlying HD 5870 architecture, but pixel fillrate, Z/Stencil, and memory bandwidth (all based on speeds) are exactly 2x.
Somewhat tenuously, the mix-and-match card doesn’t deserve the HD 5870 X2 nomenclature, says AMD, because it isn’t 2x that card, for the reasons detailed above.
source: hexus.net
