14 DAY TRIAL // The long awaited AMD GPU using the 55 nm technology, the RV670, has just been tagged with a November 19th stamp on its back according to American Technology Research's Doug Freedman. According to some sources, the GPU that will be launched will wear the ATI Radeon HD 3800 moniker, while others name it the ATI Radeon HD 2950 Pro, but the thing that everyone agrees on is that this will most probably be the 55 nm version of the R600 core.
As reghardware.co.uk reports, to make this date even more believable, Dirk Meyer, the President and COO of AMD, declared during the financial results conference: "We will launch the RV670, the world's first 55nm GPU in the fourth quarter. [..]When we launch the [RV670] product, we anticipate doing so with cards available in channels and therefore, we will drive revenue in the quarter. Obviously, with a mid-quarter launch and on a quarter-billion revenue basis, that's not going to contribute materially to the quarter."
The new GPU will be released in two different versions, the Gladiator and the Revival. The first one will have an 825 MHz GPU and will sport 512 MB of GDDR 4 on board, while the Revival will have a 750 MHz clock that comes in pair with 512 and 256 MB of GDDR3. "The main difference between the two will be Gladiator's adoption of GDDR 4 memory and an improved memory interface - 2.4GHz vs. 1.8GHz," as Doug Freeman said.
Rumor says that the RV670 GPU will come with support for DirectX 10.1, on-die UVD (Unified Video Decoder) with full hardware H.264 and VC-1 video streams decoding, PCI Express 2.0, hardware accelerated tessellation and Shader Model 4.1.
Register Hardware also mentions that AMD is expected to launch pretty much at the same time a gaming platform that will be constructed around its Phenom quad-core processor, the RD790 chipset and a pair of RV670 GPUs. This might actually turn out to be a dream come true for the gamers around the world if the performance of the RV670 GPU will prove to be everything we expect it to be.