AMD Radeon HD5870 finally shows itself

Today is the day that AMD will release more information on its new DirectX 11 graphics cards, currently branded the HD5000 series. The event where this takes place is held on a military ship near San Francisco. Despite the intentions of secrecy, images of the Radeon HD5870 -codenamed 'Cypress'- already started surfacing on the internet. This model is to become the second-fastest in AMD's initial DirectX 11 line-up. The card will only be surpassed by the two-headed 'Hemlock' Radeon HD5870X2.

The new HD5870, based on the 40 nm RV870 GPU, features over 2 billion transistors. To allow this many transistors to be placed on a single chip, it had to grow in size significantly. Where the 55nm RV770 had a surface of 256 mm², the new RV870 will take up 330 mm².

The latest reports state that this Radeon HD5870 card is equipped with 1600 stream processors, twice as many as the current RV770 chip. The clock frequency of the RV870 core is rumored to be 850 MHz, while the GDDR5 memory is clocked at 2400 MHz (effectively 4800 MHz).

The PCB of the HD5870 is about equal in length to that of the HD4870 X2, while the latter holds two cores. It's known that the HD5870 will be available in both a 1GB and a 2GB edition, though it's still unclear which of these will be the predominantly produced model. The Radeon HD5870 sports several video-outputs; apart from the two conventional DVI ports, the card has also been equipped with HDMI and DisplayPort. This allows less space for the hot air to be blown out on the rear of the card, which may indicate that the enw generation of 40 nm chips require less power than the current high-end models such as the HD4890 and HD4870 X2.

Alienbabeltech reports that the new HD5000 series will perform significantly better with anti-aliasing, due to a greatly expanded render back-end. The HD5870 will also feature a smaller brother, in the form of the HD5850. This card is to feature 1440 active stream processors. Alienababeltech also states that the HD5870 X2 won't be released until mid-October.

The Radeon HD5870 has plenty of video outputs

The Radeon HD5870 is even lengthier than the dual-GPU HD4870 X2

The card is completely covered by the cooling block, while the rear is equipped with a heatspreader

Tags: gddr5 displayport hd4870 hd4890 hdmi radeon directx directx11 rv870

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