ATI’s Next Gen GPU
ATI’s HD 4870X2 is a few weeks away from official launch, and although the R700 generation seems to be one of ATI’s best realizations thus far, the Canadians aren’t going to stop here. Some new info on the next generation has been recently leaked and it seems ATI wants to improve the performance per watt aspect, first and foremost.
The n RV870 (codename “Lil Dragon”) next gen GPU is primarily a shrink of RV770. According to NordicHardware, the node following 65/55nm (current gen) would be 45/40nm , as Intel’s and AMD’s CPU demonstrated earlier this year. However, there’s a strong possibility that the next ATI GPU would skip the 45nm phase directly to 40 nm. The main reason to do this is the achievement of a performance per watt ratio twice that of RV770.
Surprisingly, the overall performance gain for the RV870 is set somewhere around 20% over the RV770, but ATI will also drop the power consumption significantly. NordicHarsware estimates that the next gen GPU is going to integrate to 960 unified shaders (192x5), 48 texture units and 24 ROPs. Thus, the TDP of the RV870 should be around 150W, in case ATI maintains the usual frequencies.
Another mystery is represented by the inclusion of the DX11 support. Since DX11 is going to be available in late 2009 and the new GPU will be release next summer, ATI will probably stick to DX10.1 for the time being.
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