ATI RV610 - native CrossFire but no 128-bit memory?

Posted on Tuesday, March 06 2007 @ 15:49 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
AMD is planning to release the entry-level DirectX 10 RV610 GPU in May, according to HKEPC's sources. The card will feature native CrossFire support but will have 64-bit memory instead of 128-bit.
To date, AMD still hasn’t released any detail about RV610. But we know that a second-generation Unified Shaders architecture will be introduced in RV610, supporting DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0. AMD claimed the new chip would provide a doubled performance than Radeon X1300LE. Of course, the real power is not yet to know.

RV610 will be fabricated by TSMC with 65nm technology. Comparing with NVIDIA G86, which is fabricated by 80nm technology, although 65nm technology may help in some performance boost, its 64-bit memory bandwidth becomes a bottleneck and therefore overall weakens its performance than G86, which get the advantage from 128-bit memory bandwidth, according to a marketer.

To compensate the weak on 64-bit memory bandwidth, RV610 therefore supports DDR2, DDR3, GDDR3 and GDDR4 memory for the market need. Manufacturer may use high-speed GDDR4 for compensating the loss of performance.
The RV610 has HDMI support, dual-link DVI and S-Video.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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