On the heels of our previous announcement that AMD has been sucking up a lot more market share in the discrete GPU business comes news that AMD has managed to keep the supply of the wildly successful Radeon HD4850 and HD4870 graphics cards at a sustainable level. Normally this would not be newsworthy, but this scenario is in stark contrast to the previous generation of cards from AMD. Whereas before most board partners were publicly complaining about the lack of supply from AMD, several of them are actually saying that they got more parts than they expected. This is obviously great news for both AMD and anyone wanting to buy one of the new HD4000 series cards, as the buzz about the products is not likely to falter and customers will not have to look elsewhere for their graphics needs.

In other news, AMD R700 has received an official name, which to nobody’s surprise will be the Radeon HD4870 X2. This card will essentially be two Radeon HD4870’s on the same PCB, and will be available in two flavors: a 1GB GDDR3 model and a 2GB GDDR5 model. The latter of these two models is obviously expected to be significantly more expensive, but there is no doubt that the performance will improve accordingly.

Intel’s upcoming X58 motherboard for Nehalem processors will tout full support for four AMD graphics cards in CrossFireX at PCI-E 2.0 x8 speeds. Four separate physical cards can be used with each PCI-e slot operating at x8, while two Radeon HD4870 X2’s will be supported using two PCI-e slots at x16. Early performance numbers for Nehalem lead us to believe that the new architecture will decimate anything AMD can offer on the CPU front, so Intel’s cooperation with AMD for multi-GPU support - and lack of cooperation with NVIDIA - is extremely important for the company that only purchased its graphics division in mid 2006.

Source: Fudzilla

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