14 DAY TRIAL // Taiwan manufacturers claim that all is going well with AMD/ATI's RV610 scheduled release. In this sense, the next-generation entry-level graphic chip will be launched in May, although AMD has not yet disclosed any relevant official information about this product.
RV610 only integrates a 64-bit memory bandwidth, but should benefit from a second-generation Unified Shader architecture, supporting DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0. AMD states that the new chip would deliver double the performance of a Radeon X1300LE. TSMC will fabricate the new RV610 using the 65nm technology. Compare this to NVIDIA's G86 chips, which are fabricated using 80nm technology, but keep in mind that RV610 comes with a weak 64-bit memory bandwidth, resulting in no performance gains over NVIDIA's solutions, which get the advantage from 128-bit memory bandwidth.
However, the RV610 solutions will supports DDR2, DDR3, GDDR3 and high-speed GDDR4 for compensating the loss of performance. RV610 will also benefit from the upcoming PCI-E 5GT/s technology which supports x16 Lanes. The improved PCI-E Link performance has been raised from 2.5GT/s to 5GT/s, and its bandwidth is doubled to 8GB/s to fully utilize the high-bandwidth of DDR3 memories.
Standard video output features for the RV610 include HDMI, Dual Link DVI and S-Video. RV610 features Native CrossFire technology which allows two RV610 cards to work at the same time. To several marketers, this option is not seen as a good idea, because the built-in Compositing Engine could prove to be useless and not cost-effective to entry-level display chips.
According to the above mentioned Taiwanese manufacturers, AMD has 4 reference designs RV610, including Antelop FH (Full Height) and Antelop LP (Low Profile) for DDR2, and Falcon FH (Full Height) and Falcon LP (Low Profile) for GDDR3. RV610 A12 prototypes will be sent to manufacturers this month, while final samples will be ready in early April in order to be released at the beginning of May.