AMD/ATI Beats Nvidia to the 1 GHz GPU Milestone
AMD has hit another megahertz milestone record today.
AMD boasted today that it has delivered the world’s first 1 GHz GPU. Is this a new product? Not exactly.
What AMD has done is that it has taken an ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card, which normally runs at 850 MHz, and overclocked it to 1 GHz at the factory – air cooled – and voila, you have yourself the world’s first shipping 1 GHz GPU part.
In fact, if you had your own Radeon HD 4890, you might be able to reach 1 GHz too. Of course, AMD does have the advantage of binning parts to make sure that those with the most headroom get separated for this new SKU.
The flip side of that equation also means that any GPUs that aren’t able to hit the 1 GHz mark on just air cooling will be relegated to just the old “regular” pile, which will cap speeds at which the Radeon HD 4890 will run.
Look out for these juiced up video cards from Asus, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, Gecube, Gigabyte, HIS (Hightech Information Systems), ITC, Jetway, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, Sapphire Technology and XFX.
Stay tuned for our hands on with one of these cards where we'll put it up against a 'vanilla' reference board.
Interestingly enough, this is the second time that AMD has beat an arch rival to the 1 GHz milestone. Back in 2000, AMD beat Intel to the 1 GHz punch with its Athlon. Remember that? Take a trip with us down memory lane as we look back on Chris Angelini’s review of the AMD Athlon 1 GHz during his more innocent and much younger days.
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stryk55 Nice job, AMD/ATI! Though this begs the question: will we see multi-core GPUs coming out anytime in the near future, or is it just my wild pipedream?Reply -
bobbytsia Nvidia unified shaders clock have been 1.2GHz+ since G80. Nvidia was 1GHz+ almost 2.5 years ago.Reply -
hellwig stryk55: GPUs already have hundreds of shaders and dozens of texture mappers and render outputs. So they already process lots of different data streams at once. If you meant multiple-GPUs, thats what SLI and CrossFire are already accomplishing.Reply
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elbert Could this be an HD4890X2? I don't think AMD would sale a higher end GPU using the same name in a single gpu. Only time they did increase the performance and use the same name was in dual gpu x2 version.Reply -
B-Unit elbertCould this be an HD4890X2? I don't think AMD would sale a higher end GPU using the same name in a single gpu. Only time they did increase the performance and use the same name was in dual gpu x2 version.Reply
WTF are you smoking? Why would you call a faster part X2? -
thundercleese stryk55Nice job, AMD/ATI! Though this begs the question: will we see multi-core GPUs coming out anytime in the near future, or is it just my wild pipedream?Reply
GPUs are multi-core. They have been for a while now. -
ricardok And again, history repeats itself.. :)Reply
The last comment from the author of the news is the same though I had when I started reading it..
Back in 2000 when I was living in Canada I saw that "fight".. Remember the P4 bug with 1ghz speeds? lol..
A year to remember.. SlotA/Slot1 processors that resembled nintendo cartridges.. lol.. Great year for AMD.. -
Tindytim Radeon 4895? I certainly hope they give it a different name, I'd hate to have to look at the specs in every list on newegg.Reply -
blackpanther26 Nice. Now I wonder if this could be a 40nm 4890? I think if it is they should rename it to 4895.Reply