AMD Launches the ATI Radeon HD 4770

AMD Launches the ATI Radeon™ HD 4770, World’s First Desktop Graphics Card Utilizing Industry-Leading 40nm Process Technology

(NYSE:AMD) today launched the ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 graphics processor, a groundbreaking product that harnesses the state-of-the-art 40 nanometer manufacturing process for the desktop PC market, delivering best-in-class performance and energy efficiency at anticipated launch prices as low as $991. The ATI Radeon HD 4770 graphics card is the newest addition to the award-winning ATI RadeonTM HD 4000 series.· The new card features third-generation hardware support for the latest DirectX® 10.1 games like Battleforge, HAWX, S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky and Stormrise, delivering higher game performance and improved visual quality when compared to DirectX® 10.

· The ATI Radeon HD 4770 continues the AMD tradition of bringing industry-leading technology to market that drives a superior user experience. The ATI Radeon HD 4770 makes use of the latest GDDR5 memory technology, providing incredibly high data rates for fast game performance.
· Gamers looking to get the most value out of their graphics hardware investment can scale their performance using ATI CrossFireX™ technology, allowing a second ATI Radeon HD 4770 card to be added for a near-linear increase in performance.2
· The ATI Radeon HD 4770 graphics card allows users to enjoy HD digital content3 with incredible visual fidelity. The new card helps enhance the definition and clarity of lower resolution media, and through the second generation AMD Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2.0) technology, users can be assured of smooth video playback, crisp images, and vibrant colors on all HD content including Blu-ray discs.4 With support for HDMI, picture-in-picture (PiP) and the latest HD audio technologies like 7.1 surround sound, the new graphics card enables an impressive cinema-quality home entertainment experience.
· Celebrating the company’s 40th Anniversary, AMD continues its heritage of focusing on the design and development of new products and platforms that deliver compelling user experiences at an exceptional value. By combining new AMD Athlon™ X2 7850 processors, AMD 7-Series chipsets and ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 series graphics cards, AMD enables a PC platform that can bring HD video to life while delivering massive performance headroom and video processing acceleration.

“Consumer pressure in this economic downturn is shifting demand to lower prices and the price band around $100 has the highest demand and highest volume,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD.5 “AMD has responded with the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4770, targeting this market with cutting-edge technologies like 40 nm processors, support for DirectX 10.1 gaming and GDDR5 memory. This strategy stands in stark contrast to the old “trickle down” technology approach some still use to address this important segment.”

“As a leading source of cutting-edge game development tools, Emergent has a passion for delivering realistic, visually stunning game play as well as improved performance,” said Doug Kubel, vice president, Product Development, Emergent. “By supporting DirectX 10.1 in the Gamebryo LightSpeed development system, we are able to deliver improvements in both image quality and frame rates. DirectX 10.1 graphics hardware like the ATI Radeon HD 4770 makes it possible to fully unlock the experience delivered by the combined power of DirectX10.1 and Gamebryo LightSpeed.”

New Chip Design to Challenge AMD from INTEL

Intel Corp. cracked the lid Tuesday on a new chip design that is at once a big challenge to smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and an admission that AMD nailed a key design feature before it slipped into a severe financial slump.

Intel, the world's largest computer chip maker, showed off the new blueprint, known as a microarchitecture, for its chips at a developers conference in San Francisco.Though some of the details were already known, the design's formal unveiling represented another demonstration of Intel's advantage over AMD in cranking out new chip designs once every two years, a factor that helped send AMD's stock price down 5 percent in an overall down day for technology shares.

AMD has racked up nearly $5 billion in losses during the past 18 months and last month replaced Hector Ruiz, who had been running AMD for six years, with a new chief executive, Dirk Meyer.

The details of Intel's microprocessor architecture are always highly technical. But they're also closely watched because of the ubiquity of Intel's chips in personal computers and corporate servers.

One of the most significant changes was already known. Intel now plans to build a part called an integrated memory controller - which moves information between the microprocessor and the computer's memory - directly into the processor itself.

That's a key change because processors are asked to do more and more, and any lag in communication can seriously hurt performance. AMD has already been incorporating integrated memory controllers into its processors.

Because of that and other tweaks, Intel said its new design, which is code-named Nehalem, will triple the speed at which data can be written to memory or read back, compared to previous generations. Intel says Nehalem also will have nearly double the 3-D animation capabilities as past chips, and better utilize the multiple "cores," or processing engines, on each chip.

Chip makers are adding multiple cores to their chips, essentially jamming many separate processors onto the same slice of silicon, to make sure they're able to continue ramping up performance without running into overheating problems.

Intel said four-core Nehalem chips, which are due to be in production by the end of 2008 and will first target servers and desktop computers and later laptops, have the ability to turn individual cores on and off and can be programmed to boost the speed of active cores when the workload ramps up.

Second-gen AMD 790FX motherboard pictured

One major downside of current motherboards based on AMD's 790FX chispet is the SB600 south bridge, which is getting long in the tooth and suffers from lackluster PCI and SATA performance. We've been expecting 790FX motherboard based on a new south bridge since the 790FX launch, and the folks at Fudzilla have nabbed a picture and some specifications for a 790FX mobo with an "SB750" south bridge.

This "Hawkfish" motherboard is a reference AMD design, Fudzilla says, and it features four PCI Express x16 slots, one PCIe x4 slot, only a single PCI slot, six 300MB/s Serial ATA ports, one IDE port, and a "4+1" pulse width modulation design. The six SATA ports can handle RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 10, as well. On the cooling front, the north bridge chip is actively cooled with a small fan, although retail offerings may end up different—after all, original reference 790FX designs had the same cooler.

In an older report, the same site claims the SB750 south bridge will have an "OverDrive 3.0" feature that will somehow aid overclocking in Phenom CPUs. The report explains, "AMD demoed a board with the SB750, which struggled to overlock the CPU to 3GHz, but once the overclocking feature was enabled the same CPU had no problem reaching 3.2GHz."