September 23rd, 2009
ATI debuts Radeon HD 5870 with 'most powerful processor ever created'
AMD on Tuesday launched its next-generation ATI Radeon HD 5800 series graphics cards, which the company says harbors “the most powerful processor ever created” inside.
While that title is up for debate — AMD says the graphics cards offer up to 2.72 TeraFLOPS of computing power — what’s clear is that they will support Microsoft DirectX 11.
AMD’s starting with two cards: the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and the ATI Radeon HD 5850, each with 1GB GDDR5 memory.
The company says the cards can be used individually or in multiple-card configurations with ATI CrossFireX tech, and feature “6th generation evolved AMD tessellation technology, 3rd generation evolved GDDR5 support, 2nd generation evolved 40nm process technology, and a feature-rich compute shader, all geared towards delivering the best gaming experience money can buy.”
Backing the claim is this fact, the company says: “One ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card would have been one of the top 10 supercomputers in the world just six years ago.”
Whatever the accolades, the HD5870 model is built on a 40nm process and offers an 850MHz engine clock speed, 1600 stream processors, 153.6GBps memory bandwidth and more than two billion transistors.
The HD 5850 model will offer a 725MHz core clock, 1440 stream processors and slightly slower GDDR5 memory.
No word on price or availability.
Andrew J. Nusca is an associate editor for ZDNet and SmartPlanet.
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