AMD Readies High-End Update of ATI Radeon Lineup in April – Rumours.

ATI Plans to Launch Radeon HD 4890 Graphics Card in April

[02/16/2009 01:50 PM]
by Anton Shilov

In a bid to offer higher-performance in the segment of expensive graphics cards, ATI, graphics products group of Advanced Micro Devices, reportedly plans to add a yet another member to the ATI Radeon HD 4800 family of products. The new code-named RV790 chip will emerge already in April.

According to various media sources, including VR-Zone web-site, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics board will offer higher performance compared to existing Radeon HD 4870 solutions because of higher clock-speeds, 850MHz for the chip and 3900MHz for GDDR5 memory. However, there are also reports that the RV790 is a brand new processor with 960 stream processors and 48 texture units.

ATI is known for working on different speed-bins of various processors, for instance, its ATI R300, R350 and R360 were essentially the same chip, but could function at completely different clock-speeds. Potentially, ATI may now choose the same option since it does not immediately need a brand-new GPU as its arch-rival Nvidia has not introduced considerably faster solutions so far.

The recent history of graphics processing units does not know examples when a company introduced a brand-new GPU with new internal design that would only be 20% - 30% faster compared to predecessor in the same price-range. Therefore, the information about increased number of stream processors inside RV790 seems to be doubtful.

ATI did not comment on the news-story.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, AMD, RV790