Gomeler.com

I typically hate to get into the rumor industry however these figures posted over at NordicHardware sound very believable. They aren’t drastically larger than the past generation yet appear to offer enough performance to perform as expected. The RV770 core, which will form AMD’s HD4850, HD4870, and HD4870X2, will consist of 480 shaders, 160 more than RV670. There will be 16 ROPs, same as RV670, but 32 TMUs, double of RV670. The HD4850 will operate at 625MHz core with GDDR3 operating at 2286MHz on a 256-bit bus. The HD4870 will operate at 850MHz core with GDDR5 operating at a whopping 3970MHz on a 256-bit bus. Due to the sheer speed of GDDR5, RV770 will have gobs of bandwidth, 127 gigabytes per second to be precise. RV670 had only 72 gigabytes per second of bandwidth so this significant jump should help keep this larger core happily fed.

I would take these numbers with a bucket of salt but I myself have my fingers crossed that these will be true. The core and frequency values don’t sound improbably, frankly they sound appropriate so there’s a fat chance these are the right numbers. Accompanying these rumors was another rumor that RV770 yields are very high so hopefully AMD can bring a powerful card to the market without breaking the bank. Rumors of $200 to $300 launch prices for a card that’ll be a good 25% faster than the 9800GTX is great news. Expect these cards to start hitting reviewers in the next month or so, rumor has a late June launch. I wonder if I can manage to wrangle one of these, those HD4850s look incredibly tempting for some more “budget” benching.