ATI Radeon HD 5670 released, bringing DX11 for less than $100

Thursday 14th January 2010, 09:17:00 PM, written by Rys

ATI's march across the plains of consumer graphics carries on unabated today with the release of Radeon HD 5670, the start of a sub-$100 lineup of DX11-class products powered by one of two new GPUs.  HD 5670 contains the first, Redwood (RV830), a 104 square millimetre part manufactured by TSMC on their 40nm node (40G unless we're mistaken).

The 627M transistors comprise what's effectively half of Juniper's core execution resources with the same 128-bit GDDR5 memory controller.  That means 400 ALUs, 80 to a SIMD, with each SIMD connected to a texture unit that'll bilinearly filter 4 texture samples in a single of HD 5670's 775 MHz.  Two quad ROPs run at chip rate, finishing 8 pixels in a clock, and the whole thing supports the entirety of DX11's stringent spec in less than 75 watts.

HD 5670 also sports a trio of display outputs, supporting Eyefinity (so DVI, VGA and DisplayPort), and 1 GiB of 4GHz GDDR5.  The cooler is small and quiet from the looks of it, and the board itself is a far cry physically from something like HD 5870.

That means no auxiliary power connector from your PSU, which further keeps costs down and let's ATI sell you one for the initial price of $99, with absolutely no supply problem of any kind.  $99 pits it square against NVIDIA GeForce GT 240.  GT 240 uses GT215 and it's roughly the same size on TSMC 40nm (40G again), and costs almost as much at $89 (NVIDIA have since squeezed 9800 GT -- G92b on 55nm -- in at $99, but it's a margin killer for them and exists to spoil the launch of HD 5670, although the customer shouldn't care about that).

Performance wise, The Tech Report have the full details of course, our good friends squeezing in a nice analysis after a couple of days with the hardware.  We'll let them tell you where it stacks up, be sure and read the coverage, but let's just say that Redwood is a deeply impressive little piece of silicon.  Go read to find out why.

It shouldn't be too long before ATI flesh out the rest of their sub-$99 lineup too, so keep an eye out for that.

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Tagging

ati ± radeon, redwood, eyefinity, dx11, cheap

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