Advanced Micro Devices is laying claim to the world's fastest graphics card at it continues an assault on Nvidia at the high-end of the graphics chip market.
HD 5970 packs two fast graphics chips
(Credit: Advanced Micro Devices)As teased last week by AMD senior vice president Rick Bergman at a financial analyst meeting, the "Hemlock" graphics card--now officially called the ATI Radeon HD 5970--is AMD's top-of-the-line graphics product.
"It's in production. You'll be able to buy it at e-tailers around the world...Five Teraflops out of this baby," Bergman said last week. A teraflop is a trillion floating point operations per second, a key indicator of graphics performance.
Review site Tom's Hardware called it the "fastest discrete (standalone) card in the world."
The card integrates two graphics processing units (GPUs) for a total of 4.3 billion transistors. It also boasts 3,200 stream processing units and 160 texture units--tiny individual processors for accelerating graphics. And it supports Microsoft's DirectX 11 for speeding up graphics in Windows 7.
The 5970 will ship in Area-51 ALX and Aurora desktops from Dell's Alienware unit and allow "massive overclocking," according to AMD. Overclocking allows users to ratchet up chip speeds beyond the card's specified rating. "The unrivaled overclocking capabilities of the ATI Radeon HD 5970 are enabled by the unique design of the card, which features advanced fan and vapor chamber technologies and a fully vented exhaust to keep the card cool and ensure overclocking headroom using ATI Overdrive technology," AMD said in a statement.
A maximum resolution of 7680x1600 is achieved by driving up to up to three displays at once.
AMD cited games that will benefit from the card such as Electronic Art's Phenomic's BattleForge, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (GSC Game World), Battlefield Bad Company 2 (EA Dice), DiRT 2 (Codemasters), Aliens vs. Predator (Rebellion), and the update to The Lord of the Rings Online (Turbine).
Though prices will vary, some retailers are currently listing the price at $599.
Advanced Micro Devices discussed the Hemlock high-end graphics card due next week and third-generation ultra-thin laptop technology, among other topics, at the AMD Financial Analyst Day on Wednesday.
AMD Vice President Rick Bergman holds up the 'Hemlock' graphics card at AMD Financial Analyst Day on Wednesday. The product is due next week.
(Credit: AMD)"Hemlock will get launched next week," said AMD Senior Vice President Rick Bergman, speaking Wednesday morning at the conference which was streamed live. "It's in production. You'll be able to buy it at e-tailers around the world. You can see there are two GPUs. Five Teraflops out of this baby," he said. (GPU stands for graphics processing unit. A teraflop is a trillion floating point operations per second, a key indicator of graphics performance.)
Hemlock is expected to be appear as an HD 5900 series product--what some reports have called the HD 5970.
Bergman also addressed AMD's third-generation "Nile" ultra-thin laptop platform. "Bring the real PC experience into the ultra-thin. Battery life well north of seven hours," Bergman said. This is due ... Read more
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