Radeon HD4770 to be released on May 4th

It's been just over a month since we first encountered it; AMD's first 40nm 3D-chip. The 40nm production is the next step in shrinking the transistors and should allow even more efficient and faster graphics cards. The first 40nm card to be released is the RV740, which will be launched as the HD4700 series. A first glance at the new series, as well as a number of benchmarks, have already roamed the web since February.

Now -several weeks later- new information on this 40nm videochip has been revealed. Website IT168 has acquired three of AMD's presentation slides. These present an image of what the HD4770 will look like, and more importantly, which specifications it'll have. The HD4770 will feature a dual-slot cooling, which bears quite a resemblance to the cooler on the older Radeon HD3870. The RV740 chip will be clocked at 750 MHz, while the GDDR5 memory will be running at an effective frequency of 3200 MHz, making for a total memory bandwidth of 51.2 GB/s.

The HD4770's 750 MHz core clockspeed reaches 960 GFlops

The card's 640 shader units allow it to reach a calculative performance of 960 GFlops, which is just under the 1 TFlop reached by a Radeon HD4850. The HD4770 will be positioned in a lower price range though, AMD compares it to competitor nVidia's GeForce 9800GT. When we compare the specifications of both cards, nVidia has to admit defeat. AMD claims that the HD4770 reaches 9.1 GFlops per dollar, whereas the 9800GT is stuck at 5.1 GFlops per dollar. In the area of power consumption, AMD prevails once more, claiming 12 GFlops per watt, while the 9800GT attains up to 4.8GFlop per watt.

The RV740 GPU features about 826 million transistors, which make for a maximum power consumption of 80 Watt. The card's recommended price will be $99, certainly no bad thing given the performance it provides. AMD's HD4700 series will officially be launched on the 4th of May, later this year. 

The HD4700 series performs just under the HD4800 cards

Tags: gddr5 geforce hd4850 radeon hd4770

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