AMD has shipped the first samples of the Evergreen family to selected partners and reviewers, and it will have the card available at the upcoming Quakecon in Dallas, Texas. What and how much AMD will show we don't know, but you should become aware quite soon as the event opens today. We would expect a cool demonstration showing off the power of DirectX 11 more than the performance of the actual product, but who knows...
You might have heard rumors of some odd memory configurations going around and a source close to AMD has confirmed this. Numbers are pointing to something like 384-bit and GDDR5 with the high-end X2 part, 192-bit and GDDR5 with the performance part, and then scaled down to 96-bit and perhaps even 48-bit with lower-end parts. The numbers are still pending confirmation, but we are quite confident AMD will bring some odd memory configurations to the market with Evergreen.
Names and specifications are just waiting to be leaked, but so far they are still hard to confirm. It does however look like RV870, Cypress, will sport something in the range of 1600 shaders, 80 texture units and 32ROPs, with RV830, Redwood, at 800 shaders, 40 texture units and 32ROPs and Cedar at slightly less. These numbers are mainly speculation at this point.
However, we did learn at that AMD has a card with performance better than Radeon HD 4850 but consuming less than 75W. We would expect this to be a flavor of Redwood, RV830. Evidently, AMD has mastered the 40nm process and managed to reduce power consumption while maintaining good performance.
Comment 
Send to a friend
Related news:
2009-11-20 AMD confirms 40nm problems at TSMC
2009-11-12 AMD and Intel Announce Settlement of All Antitrust and IP Disputes
2009-11-12 AMD goes multithreading and Fusion with Bulldozer
2009-11-12 AMD 890GX gets 700MHz DirectX 10.1 GPU
2009-11-10 AMD moves USB 3 support into 2011
Evergreen at Quakecon, odd memory configs, samples shipping
Noctua
