AMD announced today the release of two new graphic cards targeted at the high end of the market. The new cards, called ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 and HD 4870 X2 both have dual graphic chips that are linked with a dedicated bridge chip and using the CrossFireX technology that the company has developed.

Experts think that the new graphic cards will outperform the GeForce GTX 280 graphic card developed by Nvidia. While the GTX 280 was considered better than the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870, it is believed that the addition of another graphic chip to these cards made them better than the Nvidia rival.

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is available as of the announcement, while people who want to test the HD 4850 X2 will have to wait until September. The HD 4870 X2 comes with two graphic chips that run at 750 MHz, compared with the ones that the HD 4850 features that run at 625 MHz. The more powerful of the two cards also sports 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, while the other one has 2 GB of GDDR3 memory.

A chip that would be similar to the ones for these two cards might be used by AMD in its upcoming family of chips, which is called Fusion. Whether these new chips will make AMD grab a stronger share of the market remains to be seen, but until Intel's Larrabee won't be released, it will be hard to make any assumptions.

According to the PC Magazine, Pat Moorhead, a vice president at Advanced Micro Devices asked this rhetorical question  about the Larrabee:  “Even with how big, mighty and forceful Intel is, after years of misfires in graphics, are they going to be able to pull this off?”