ATI Reportedly Readies Radeon HD 5900 Family of Graphics Cards

From Tom's Hardware: ATI seems to be working on an enhanced version of its ATI Radeon HD 5000-series graphics cards aimed at high-end market. While it is hardly surprising that ATI would prefer to sustain performance leadership after its arch-rival Nvidia Corp. releases its Fermi-G300 high-end offering, it is not clear whether the company plans to overclock its code-named Cypress chip, develop a completely new ASIC [application specific integrated circuit] with increased clock-speed, introduce a graphics processing unit (GPU) with increased amount of stream processors, or completely change its long-established naming scheme and just put two existing chips onto the same board.

The latest OpenCL beta drivers from ATI-AMD apparently support ATI Radeon HD 5900-series graphics solutions, according to visitor of Beyond3D forums, who claims that he has obtained the drivers. The new Radeon 5900-series has device identifications (dev ids) “689C” and “689D”, whereas the existing Radeon 5800-series of chips (also known as Cypress) carry “6888” and “6889” dev ids.

Traditionally, identifications for different graphics cards based on the same chip are similar: ATI Radeon HD 4800 graphics cards based on the RV770 chip have 9440, 9441 (Radeon HD 4870 X2), 9442, 944C, 9443 (Radeon HD 4850 X2) device ids, whereas ATI Radeon HD 4800 boards powered by the RV790 chip carry 9460 and 9462 identifications. As it can be seen, the combination of the first three symbols in dev id describes the actual ASIC, whereas the fourth symbol describes the actual implementation (including speed-bin and/or the number of ASICs onboard).

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