Advanced Micro Devices announced today the release of its
new ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 and 4870 X2 graphics cards, which aims at Nvidia’s
market shares, gained with its top-end graphics card, the GeForce GTX 280.
The ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 will be available starting with
September for $399 and the 4870 X2 already ships out for $599, prices which
might be considered a bit steep for many customers.
The company explained that its dual-GPU versions are
expected to take the lead of the super high end of the market, where the
performance is considered far more important than the price. Acording to the
company’s officials, the new HD 4870 X2 provides a major performance boost,
offering an additional 80 percent and making it the world’s fastest graphics
card with a recorded score of 17743 in 3Dmark06.
"We did some driver work, along with this bridge chip,
to make this somewhat seamless," said Pat Moorhead, vice president of
advanced market at AMD. "That took a lot of work."
"We're going to create the next generation of image
solutions, focused on processing power, rather than just having a faster
widget," said Nigel Dessau, the company's newly appointed chief marketing
officer, in an interview yesterday.
Besides the new offer, the company also provides products
for the low end and middle range market, with its HD 4850 single-GPU cards
available in the $100 and $200 range, the HD 4870 cards sold in the $200-$400
category and the HD 4850 X2 and HD 4870 X2 cards presented above.
AMD’ announcement follows after Intel decided to cut the
waiting, and give us some new graphic chip, Larrabee. The chipmaker promises to
deliver in Larrabee improved performance, based on a new technology that will include
at least ten x86 CPU cores onto a single chip, instead of the traditional GPUs.
Intel’s upcoming Larrabee architecture relies on visual
computing, and compared to mainstream graphics that offer rigid architecture
and are inefficient for non-graphics computing, Larrabee comes with
programmable architecture, high definition audio and video processing, and
combines with model based computing.
With Larrabee, Intel is entering a new era of parallel
computing, offering developers means of creating graphics –intensive
applications. Furthermore, Intel supports the industry-standard application
programming interfaces Direct X and Open CL.
