Ati's HD3000 series EOL this quarter

After the succesful launch of the new HD4800 graphics cards, AMD can focus on the upcoming midrange and budget cards based on this new architecture. The cards, branded the HD4600 and HD4400 series are based on respectively the RV730 and the RV710 GPU. These cards are expected around September.

To make room for the new HD4400 and HD4600, AMD will give the end-of-life (EOL) status to the existing HD3000 line-up in the third quarter of this year. The reason being that AMD wishes to keep a clear overview of its products and to prevent the overlay between different products. This means that the production of those cards will be stopped by then, but they will be available in the stores a while after that still. 

There's not much known about the low-end RV710 yet, but there are rumors that the RV730 (HD4600 series) will be a tweaked HD3800 card with 320 renewed shader units and a narrowed memory bus, making the card a bit slower than the HD3800 line-up.  Information on the memory type of the HD4400/HD4600 appeared earlier already.

The HD3000 series has to clear the field for the HD4400 and HD4600 graphics cards

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