Today, AMD finally takes the wraps of their new ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 cards, based on their RV670 GPU. At 55nm and 320 Stream Processors strong, these new cards are set to do battle with the likes of a Gefore 8800 GT and GTS. Here's a snip from the article...
“As for the fundamental blocks inside the GPU, the RV670 doesn’t differ very much from R600. The RV670 still has 320 stream processing units, 16 texture units, and 16 ROPs. The RV670 however, does away with the 1024-bit internal ring-bus memory controller in favor of a 512-bit variant. And its memory interface has also been pared down from 512-bits to 256-bit. From high-level perspective, these changes sound-like downgrades, but other tweaks to the GPU negate a massive loss of internal and external bandwidth.”
ATI Radeon HD 3870 and HD3850
Marco Chiappetta
Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com
