ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series discussion

[Macadamia]

Guy, they can't afford to make big chips anymore. The correct thing to say is that AMD is "playing the cards they have the best they can."

Really?
What's a Phenom (Barcelona) then?


There's the problem with needing both GDDR5 and a >256-bit memory bus for enough bandwidth though. The former hurts prices, the latter hurts ATI's chip size more because the ringbus itself is quite huge. The "SP"s, TMUs are much cheaper though. I might add, cheap enough for nVidia to be very afraid.


These cards can do double precision floating point using all their existing SP units while nVidia had to add in new ones to get a slower DP speed cap (200GFLOPS on RV770 vs 70-something GFLOPS on GT200 if my memory is right)