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RV870 codenamed "Lil Dragon", 40nm
Radeon HD 4850 X2 to be priced at $399, GTX 280 price cut needed
SOURCEIt's been known for some time that RV870 would be a shrink of RV770. The node following 65/55nm would be 45/40nm, but we weren't sure if AMD would go to 45nm or directly to half-node 40nm. It's now clear that AMD will go directly to 40nm and aim for a performance per watt ratio twice that of RV770. RV870 has been code-named "Lil Dragon", which does indicate that this will be something small, yet something to fear.
The overall performance has been suggested to be somewhere around 20% better than RV770 with a significant drop in power consumption. This points to 960 shaders (192x5), 48 texture units, 24 ROPs and so forth. If this is the case, TDP of the RV870 should be around 150W at most with today's frequencies. This is just an estimate on our part as technical specifications are still hard to come by. We also presume AMD to stay at DirectX 10.1 for now.
Radeon HD 4850 X2 to be priced at $399, GTX 280 price cut needed
SOURCEAfter the drama of losing the performance crown, Nvidia should be preparing for another hard hit from AMD as the company is promoting the upcoming Radeon hD 4850 X2 as a cheaper and faster alternative to the GeForce GTX 280. Making use of two RV770 GPUs, the 4850 X2 will offer 2GB of GDDR3 memory and 1600 Stream Processors and, according to AMD, it will be faster than any single-chip card out there, including the beefy GeForce GTX 280.
Priced at $399, the HD 4850 X2 should not only be faster but also cheaper than the GTX 280 (currently found at $429+) and this situation may 'convince' Nvidia to cut the price of its flagship card further. Hopefully for the Green Team, the 55nm GT200 GPUs will be ready to ship next month and see to the release of a few +-equipped cards (GeFoce GTX 260+/280+). Hate it or love it, you can't stop competition (BEd: Or Rock and Roll)