Ati radeon hd 5870 - Ati News!

We’re back from our brief vacation, and time to talk about the latest news once more. After announcing the first DirectX 11 GPUs, ATI is completing the notebook versions of those GPUs to be commercialized in November, unless there are delays.

The first DX11 graphic chips will be the 40nm solutions to which ATI will have enough distribution units (there was a problem with the HD 4770, that had a higher request than models available). The first top-level chips, called Brodway, already have a few testing units produced, while the big manufacturing should start in November, and even though perhaps it will take a little longer to buy a notebook featuring the DirectX 11 graphics, it shouldn’t take too long.

AMD has presented their new top-of-the-line model in the beginning of this month, with the name of HD4890, placing itself in a slightly superior position than the previous HD4870.

In order to counteract the boost in performance that nVidia has achieved with their 55nm fabrication process, and the launch of the GeForce GTX 295, which had no rivals in ATI models, ATI had to find a quick solution to keep up with the competition, and the HD4890 seemed like a good option.

Months bfore the initial launch, there was much speculation on how the new ATI proposal based on the RV790 could have been, and there were rumors of a higher number of stream processors or even a 512Bit memory controller. But it seemed unlikely that AMD would create a whole new CPU, first because of the costs involved, and the fact that the new GPU is already being projected.

AMD has thus decided to enhance the current GPU performance, with low costs and a very high performances, while waiting for the next generation of graphic cards.

The Digitimes website reports informations about one of the famous ATI partners that has decided to leave the graphic cards market in order to dedicate themselves to the development of other solutions.

We’re talking about GeCube, a company that belonged partly to Gigabyte Technology, more precisely 61.5%. Gigabyte has sold their part on the GeCube stocks to another company (unknown for the moment) who has decided to use a different commercial strategy. The graphic cards division was then sold to another company, while internally, a cooperation with a partner not connected to the graphic world has started, aiming at the development of multimedia and mobile solutions.

GeCube was one of the most active ATI partners when it came to the customization of their own graphic cards, developing designs that were not completely similar to ATI’s reference boards. This had allowed the manufacturer to gain the attention of the most passionate users that look for original solutions.

Bill Dally, nVIDIA’s chief scientist released an interview to Techradar, in which he mentions the possibility of the CUDA technology being supported also by ATI video cards. Quoting directly from the website: “In the future you’ll be able to run C with CUDA extensions on a broader range of platforms,so I don’t think that will be a fundamental limitation.”

Although ATI’s name wasn’t directly mention, the choice of removing obstacles that limit the CUDA development and distribution could be a true possibility, and it would give room also to ATI video cards. Bill Dally has also mentioned Brook, the programming language that AMD Stream uses, indicating it as one of the biggest reasons for the limitations the ATI solution has.

Dally obviously takes the time to praise his own company: according to him, the graphic cards produced by nVIDIA are definitely better. Do you agree with that?

According to the latest rumors, ATI would be ready to launch the first DirectX 11 video cards in the same time as Microsoft would launch the new Windows 7 OS, that integrates the new DX11 APIs.

If those rumors are correct, then the ATI RV870 should be launched on the market on the first half of October. With this launch, ATI should arrive to the DX11 before nVIDIA, without really introducing anything new or revolutionary, though. In fact, the RV870 will be DX11 and feature a bigger number of shaders than the current ATI proposals, but will basically be using concepts already used on the RV770.

The new ATI models will be manufactured at 40nm and it will allow the chip to work at higher frequencies and have a bigger number of transistors.

At the Computex 2009 in Taipei, AMD has shown a 300mm “wafer” containing the first new generation GPU’s, compatible with DirectX 11. Those are chips manufactured with a 40nm process and known so far as RV870 and indicated by AMD with the codename “Evergreen”. Unfortunately, the details released are very few, but the new chip should arrive on the market together with Microsoft’s new Operational System, Windows 7.

AMD has also shown a few demo videos on the DirectX 11 features, such as SM 5.0, tesselation, Multithreaded Rendering and Compute Shaders.

People are talking a lot about the RV870 chip that ATI will launch in the near future. But AMD has also other plans for chips based on the RV870. The company is aiming to launch the new chip, and then present the RV840 for the medium-entry market, and the RV810 for the lower-entry models. The high-entry market will be featuring a dual-chip card, codenamed R800 and featuring two RV870 cores.

The series that will be born from these products will probably be called Radeon HD 5800. The 5870 should feature the RV870 and a dual-chip R800 called Radeon HD 5870 X2. It’s probable that those models will be launched by the end of the year, while for the RV810, customers will have to wait a little more. There are no other rumors about any technical specification for the RV840 and RV810.

All the cores will be manufactured at 40nm and feature DirectX 11 support.

ATI has informed that the new generation of graphic cards will feature dual-GPU proposals, commonly known as X2.

The R800 will be based on two RV870 chips, 40nm GPUs and compatible with the new DirectX 11 that will be launched with Windows 7. According to rumors, seems that the new dual GPU will be a direct competition to Nvidia’s GT300.

The R800, as well as the GT300 from nVIDIA, will probably be launched by the end of this year.

ATI has published the new ATI Cataylist 9.5 drivers for download, more exactly the versions for the Radeon HD 2000 series and beyond. AMD has confirmed that the drivers would be indeed available today, despite having been scheduled for last Friday.

For now, ATI hasn’t released any notes regarding the new version, but it’s likely that the information will appear together with the disponibility of those drivers on their website.

AMD has announced the fusion of two internal departments dedicated to the development of microprocessors and graphic chips under a division called Products, consolidating the fusion that started almost three years ago.

After ATI’s acquisition by AMD, on July 2006, the two companies have gradually united the forces, optimizing the manufacturing areas and creating the Fusion project which would consist in creating a device that could feature the performance of a CPU and a GPU together.

The union of both teams under one division will allow the company to have a more efficient developing team and the creation of technologic lines that can be shared in the two sectors. The restructuring will also include the fusion between ATI’s workstation chip development team with AMD’s mainstream department.