Rumour control: AMD / ATI RV770 release date revealed

Posted at: 10:36am 13th March 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

The first genuinely new architecture from ATI since the Radeon HD 2900 could be out in a few months

It’s about time that AMD / ATI developed a new GPU architecture; we liked the Radeon HD 3850 when it came out, but there’s no getting around the fact that it was basically a Radeon HD 2900XT after a die-shrink, with added DirectX 10.1 and PCI-E 2.0 support. However, if the rumours are to be believed, then the next ATI chip could be out by the end of June this year.

The Taiwanese gossip diggers over at DigiTimes report that AMD has recently told its partners that it expects its share in the graphics card market to jump from 35 per cent to 50 per cent. The reason? Apparently, because the RV770 will be available at the end of the second quarter of 2008. DigiTimes cites sources at graphics card makers for the information.

There has been a lot of speculation about the specs of RV770, but we haven’t seen anything that looks legitimate yet. The guys at VR-Zone reported today that the chip will have 800 stream processors, made up of five arrays of 160. Meanwhile, Nordic Hardware reckons that it will have 480 stream processors and 1GB of GDDR5 memory, and that the top chip will be called the Radeon HD 4870. We don’t believe a word of either of the above at the moment, apart from perhaps the name, but we’re liking the idea of a new ATI architecture being released in a few months.