14 DAY TRIAL // Sunnyvale, California-based AMD officially announced yesterday the introduction of the world's first 1GHz GPU, presenting the new factory-overclocked, air-cooled ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics processing unit. The card is almost identical to the chip maker's previously released HD4890, which was clocked at a cooler 850MHz. However, with the GPU clocked at 1GHz and featuring the standard dual-slot cooling solution, AMD's Radeon HD 4890 graphics accelerator manages to impress by delivering 1.6 TeraFLOPs of compute power.
“Throughout the 40-year history of AMD, we have continually focused on technology firsts that deliver superior value to the customer,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president, Products Group, AMD. “The 1GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 continues that tradition by increasing the performance and compute power of our flagship single-GPU solution, ensuring a great experience whether our customers are playing the latest DirectX 10.1 game or running GPU accelerated applications built with OpenCL.”
AMD can certainly pride itself as being an innovator, having been the first graphics chip maker to adopt 55nm and 40nm technology and now establishing another record with the world's first, out-of-the-box 1GHz graphics card. With the company's official announcement, its partners are expected to adapt their lineups of Radeon-based graphics cards and roll out custom versions of the GPU. According to AMD, companies such as ASUS, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE, Gigabyte, HIS (Hightech Information Systems), ITC, Jetway, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE Technology and XFX have welcomed the new card and will likely release their versions of the GPU.
AMD hasn't unveiled any details regarding the pricing of its new solution, but the chip maker will probably set the price similar to that of the standard Radeon HD4890, in order to better position the card with competitive GPUs from NVIDIA.