AMD, Ready to Ship its Radeon 4800 GPU Series

Advanced Micro Devices is reportedly pushing forward the release date for its upcoming RV770 series of graphics cards. Although the company posted $8 million loss during the first quarter of 2008, the company is not facing any technology and development challenges.

The graphics specialist is making the final adjustments to the next generation of its graphics cards. According to Dirk Meyer, the company's chief operating officer, AMD will introduce some new graphics products based on the RV770 graphics core early next month. The upcoming products will target both at the desktop and the notebook markets.

The RV770 graphics core will be commercially introduced as Radeon 4800. The first cards powered by the next-gen graphics processor will be the FireStream stream processor and FireGL workstation offerings. The new chip is touted as supporting both GDDR3 and GDDR5 graphics memory, but the company chose to only offer the GDDR5 version.

The mainstream Radeon 4850 cards will sport a core clock speed of more than 800 MHz, although the company did not nail a final working frequency. The Radeon 4870 higher-end counterpart will be the first publicly-available graphics core with speeds exceeding 1 GHz, and the company managed to achieve 1.05 GHz clocks on the reference boards.

Enhanced clock speeds are not all: the new graphics chip will come packed with more texture memory units (TMUs), and early reports claim that the RV770 core will sport no less than 32 TMUs.

AMD plans to release the new graphics cards in versions of 256/512/1024 MB of GDDR5. However, the 256 MB versions will only be available for OEMs and system integrators, while the vast majority of the retail versions will come with 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. The company did not set a working frequency for the onboard GDDR5 memory, but it is expected to be running at between 1.8 and 2.2 GHz.

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