Today, AMD launched its much-delayed and much-awated HD 2000 series of GPU products, all of which are based on the same unified shader architecture that powers the Xbox 360. The R600, as the top end of the HD 2000 series was codenamed, is the first major new product launched after the AMD/ATI merger.
Briefing the press in Malaysia was Mr Vijay Sharma, Director of Product Marketing Graphics Product Group.
HD 2000 series
The 2000 series consists of three different GPU cores packaged into graphics card products that are aimed at three different segments: the 2900 products are for the enthusiast segment, the 2600 are for mainstream desktops, and the 2400 are for the budget end of the market. The bottom two product lines are further stratified along the lines of GPU clockspeed and the amount of GDDR3 on the card.
Each of the three lines includes both desktop parts marketed under the ATI Radeon brand and mobile parts sold under the ATI Mobility Radeon brand.
Most of the 2000 series GPUs are manufactured on TSMC's 65nm process, a fact that's allegedly responsible for their delay in coming to market, with the high-end desktop and mobile parts being made on TSMC's 80nm half-node process and 90nm process, respectively. The newer process technology is necessary to make these extremely large GPUs even workable, and given its ~215 watt power draw I expect that AMD/ATI will shrink the top-end, 700 million-transistor HD 2900 to 65nm or lower at the first available opportunity.
As has been widely reported here and elsewhere, the HD 2000 series shares some DNA with the Xbox 360's "Xenos" GPU, also designed by ATI. The Xenos was the first implementation of ATI's unified shader architecture (USA), which, in a nutshell, lets all of the device's execution hardware process any of the three types of graphics shader programs: vertex, geometry, and pixel.
Overview
AMD ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT
AMD ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro
AMD ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
AMD ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro
Specification
HD 2400 | HD 2600 | HD 2900 | |
Stream Processing Units | 40 | 120 | 320 |
Clock Speed | 525-700 MHz | 600-800 MHz | 740 MHz |
Math Processing Rate (mul-add) | 42-56 GigaFLOPS | 114-192 GigaFLOPS | 475 GigaFLOPS |
Pixel Processing Rate | 4.2-5.6 Gigapixels/sec | 14.4-19.2 Gigapixels/sec | 47.5 Gigapixels/sec |
Triangle Processing Rate | 262-350 Mtri/sec | 600-800 Mtri/sec | 742 Mtri/sec |
Texture Units | 4 | 8 | 16 |
Render Back-Ends | 4 | 4 | 16 |
Peak Board Power | ~25W | ~45W | ~215W |
Now, lets wait the see how the price battle between two giants nVidia and AMD-ATi takes place in Indian market. As a AMD-ATi fan, I hope that AMD will use its well known price-performance strategy. I am on no hurry, better wait for few months or one year untill true Dx10 games come out. Till then enjoy the battle and the price drop.
Just wondering what intel will do about this growing Dx10 market ??