[Kal-EL]

ATI Radeon 5870 and 5870X2 specs revealed?
4/24/2009 by: Theo Valich - Get more from this author



German site ATI-Forum probably scored a coup of 2009 - according to their sources, ATI's RV870-based cards are already out at selected partners.
We cannot say was this leak was a reaction on our joint-exclusive story about nVidia's GT300 architecture, but one thing is for sure - ATI wants to bring out their Cypress board as soon as possible - planned for July 2009.
The alleged specifications of RV870 reveal that this chip is not exactly a new architecture, but rather a DirectX 11-specification tweak of the RV770 GPU architecture. Just like nVidia's GT300 architecture, the actual RV870 chip is manufactured in TSMC's 40nm half-node process, packing more transistors than GT200 chips. Regardless of what ATI says about nVidia and large dies, the fact of the matter is that ATI is making a large die as well - but the company will continue to use the dual-GPU approach to reach high-end performance.
The RV870 chip should feature 1200 cores, divided into 12 SIMD groups with 100 cores each [20 "5D" units], while RV770 was based on 10 SIMD group with 80 cores total [16 "5D" groups consisting out of one "fat" and four simpler ones]. Thus, it is logical to conclude that when it comes to execution cores, not much happened architecturally - ATI's engineers increased the number of registers and other demanding architectural tasks in order to comply with Shader Model 5.0 and DirectX 11 Compute Shaders. The core is surrounded with 48 texture memory units, meaning ATI is continuing to increase the ROP:Core:TMU. For the first time, ATI is shipping a part with 32 ROP [Rasterizing OPeration] units, meaning the chip is able to output 32 pixels in a single clock.

Read Full Article @ Source: http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...-revealed.aspx