ATI Launches Radeon HD 4890; Over 50,000 Already Shipped

From DailyTech: ATI, the graphics division of AMD, has launched the Radeon HD 4890 video card exclusively with 1 GB of GDDR5 RAM.

The RV790 is not just an overclocked RV770. DailyTech noticed the RV790 chip was slightly larger than the RV770 when we acquired a reference board several weeks ago. It is a new respin of the original silicon, with retrained and rearchitectured power paths for greater power efficiency. ATI engineers also used decoupling capacitors in a decap ring to increase signal integrity.

All of this enables higher clock speeds. While the Radeon 4870 has a core clock of 750MHz, the Radeon 4890 runs its core clock at 850MHz. Several ATI graphics board partners will be launching models running at over 1GHz using improved cooling solutions, along with 50nm GDDR5 chips from Samsung capable of up to 7 Gb/s. The standard GDDR5 runs at 3.9GHz effective, and provides 124.8 GB/s of bandwidth.

Power consumption is also greatly reduced. The Radeon 4890 board consumes approximately 60W at near idle loads, such as when displaying 2D graphics or working on Word or Excel documents. This is a 50% reduction from the Radeon 4870, which used to consume 90W at idle.

On the flip side, maximum board power is now rated at 190W with the 4890, an increase of 30W. This is due to the higher clock speeds of both the GPU and the GDDR5 memory.

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