14 DAY TRIAL // Following our story last week on the alleged release of Sapphire's Radeon HD 5670 graphics card, new reports on the Internet indicate that the Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices is preparing to launch a new series of mainstream cards. Designed to enable DirectX 11-support for the masses, the new cards should be officially announced sometime later this month, according to current rumors on the Internet.
Built on the same 40nm manufacturing technology that has been enabled on all of AMD's latest series of ATI Radeon graphics cards, the new Radeon HD 5670 seems to enable half the performance of Juniper GPU. The card, according to available details, will be featured with 400 stream processors, 40 texture units and 128-bit memory interface. As you can expect, different configurations of the new card will be made available, including models with either 512MB or 1024MB of memory.
The technical specifications, as they can be read from a recent article on Fudzila, include a GPU speed of between 775MHz to 850MHz, depending on the version that will be released by manufacturers. In addition, the memory frequency could range between 1000MHz and 1200MHz, depending on the model. These small differences between the technical specifications of the upcoming Radeon card should translate into different designs with corresponding price tags.
Adding support for DirectX 11, ATI CrossFireX and ATI Stream technology, the upcoming 40nm GPU-based card should provide consumers with a choice for a small desktop graphics card. Depending on designs, these cards might do very well as the graphics cards inside an HTPC, enabling support for the aforementioned technologies and a high-quality visual experience.
As for pricing, the Redwood-based HD 5670 is said to start at €79, according to the aforementioned source, although the official release could set the prices a bit lower. If you look forward to buying one of these new cards, you'll have to wait until next week, according to Fudzilla, by which time retailers should have them in stock.