Although on the surface it would appear AMD has hit rock bottom in terms of its financial situation, the company has been making great strides lately with its product line. It is likely that the $358 Million dollar loss posted by AMD for Q1 was partly the result of dropping prices to gain market share and enhance the public image of its brand names, because it is hard to label the products that AMD has produced over the past six months as anything but good.

During AMD’s Q1 earnings call, President and Chief Operating Officer Dirk Meyer revealed some details about upcoming products. Most interestingly for our readers will be the RV770 graphics chip, which will launch as the Radeon HD4800 series. AMD has reportedly seen tremendous yields and performance out of its RV770, and is rushing the product to market because of this. We have heard from sources within AMD that the RV770 outperforms their current single-chip graphics offerings by 200%, though numbers like that are hard to believe. RV770 is able to run with GDDR3 and GDDR5 memory, and AMD plans to launch HD4850 and HD4870 cards with GDDR5 in the coming months. AMD will double the texture memory units (TMUs) over current generation chips to 32 from 16. AMD’s current Radeon HD3870 has been criticized for its 16 TMU bottleneck and this upgrade clearly addresses that issue. Shipping clock speeds for the RV770 core are said to be 800MHz+, though reports indicate the core has been seen running at over 1GHz. Typical memory clocks for currently-available GDDR5 chips is upwards of 2.0GHz. The card will likely sample during May and ship shortly thereafter, probably in June.

AMD also released some details regarding its upcoming SB750 southbridge, which will be the main constituent of next-generation motherboards for Phenom processors. There has not been too many specifics revealed, but Fudzilla claims that there will be some kind of special overclocking ability added to SB750 that will enable never-before-seen clock speeds on current Phenom processors. In tests we have conducted and indeed tests from other publications, Phenom processors have not exhibited tremendous overclocking ability. The Phenom X4 9850BE processor that AMD just released can reach a stable overclock of 3.0GHz unreliably, but that is probably the most impressive increase that anybody has seen. The new chipset will supposedly allow Phenom processors to reach 3.2GHz with ease. To us this sounds too good to be true, but with OverDrive 3.0 and other features added to the SB750, anything is possible.

Source: TG Daily, Fudzilla

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