ATI Radeon X800, X600, X300, and Mobility Radeon X600 officially announced

AMD Athlon 64 3700+/3500+ and Athlon 64 FX-53 (Socket 939): for the sake of justice

AMD Athlon 64 3800+ officially announced

ATI Radeon X800, X600, X300, and Mobility Radeon X600 officially announced

ATI officially announced its new PCI Express GPUs: Radeon X800, X600, X300. If you remember, X800 AGP version was already introduced early in May.

Let´s sum up X800 key features:

• 160 million transistors
• 130nm process, low-k dielectrics
• 500MHz core clock
• 1GHz memory clock (supports JEDEC GDDR3)
• 16-stage pixel pipeline
• 6-vertex pipeline
• 200 GFLOPS performance
• 8 billion pixels per second fillrate
• "Native" PCI Express (another riposte to NVIDIA using High-Speed Interconnect)
• PCI-Express 16x

X800 supports the following technologies:

• 3Dc Image Enhancement & Acceleration, HDTV
  • SMARTSHADER HD pixel shaders
  • 1,536 instructions/clock
  • Variable shader length (several clocks and F-buffer are used if needed)
  • Hardware trigonometry
• SMOOTHVISION HD antialiasing
  • Sparse sample pattern AA and gamma correction
  • Temporal AA (up to 12x)
  • Centroid AA
  • 16X Aniso with adaptive heuristics
• HyperZ HD Z buffer
  • Hierarchical buffer for up to 1920x1080
  • Filters up to 256 pixels per clock
  • Up to 32 Z stencils per clock
• VIDEOSHADER HD
  • Hardware acceleration of MPEG 1, 2, 4, WMV9
  • FULLSTREAM Video Deblocking, postprocessing and filtering
  • Gamma correction
  • YUV:RGP, 3:2 conversions

RADEON X600 is positioned as the mainstream base. It features:

• 4-stage pixel pipeline
• 2-stage vertex pipeline
• 500MHz core clock
• 740MHz memory clock
• Advanced AA & AF

Finally, X300 is meant for inexpensive boards, but is company´s first 0.11µm GPU:

• 4-stage parallel pixel pipeline
• SMARTSHADER 2.0, DX9 shaders
• SMOOTHVISION 2.1
• 16X Anisotropic Filtering, Multisample AA, Color Compression
• HYPER Z III

ATI also introduced the new mobile product, Mobility X600, also designed for PCI Express.

Besides PCI Express, Mobility X600 is interesting with the LTRC (LCD Time Response Compensation) technology called to reduce response time influence and improve LCD image quality. The new GPU also utilizes PowerPlay 5.0 and Vari-Bright (contrast and brightness adjust depending on display type).

Another interesting feature of Mobility X600 is its support for 64MB or 128MB memory. This GPU is made using MCP (Multi-Chip Package) technology that is rather popular already (also used in IBM processors and Samsung flash memory).

The mobile novelties will be shipped in AXIOM (Advanced eXpress I/O Module) modules designed considering MRX600 features. If you remember, NVIDIA has recently informed on its own mobile GPUs. At that AXIOM is totally different, but that´s not very surprising, especially considering the latest conflicts.

AMD Athlon 64 3700+/3500+ and Athlon 64 FX-53 (Socket 939): for the sake of justice

Of course, today AMD introduced another three processors — Athlon 64 FX-53, Athlon 64 3700+ and 3500+, besides Athlon 64 3800+. Nevertheless, we dedicated the first news only to Athlon 64 3800+. But now it´s high time to take a look at the trio above.

Like 3800+, Athlon FX-53 and 3500+ are designed for Socket 939. As expected, 3800+ is not the most expensive — the leader is Athlon 64 FX-53 offered for $799 in over 1,000-unit quantities. Meanwhile, 3700+ and 3500+ models cost $710 and $500, respectively.

Socket 754 Athlon 64 3700+ and 3400+ processors differ only by clock rate. And again, Socket 939 Athlon 64 3800+ and 3500+ are based on the Newcastle core with paired-down cache.

Sources: AMD, Hot Hardware

AMD Athlon 64 3800+ officially announced

AMD announced its new Athlon 64 3800+ (Socket 939) processor made using 130nm process technology. The 2.4GHz novelty supports 1GHz HyperTransport (up to 8GB/s throughput) and features dual-channel memory controller and 512KB of L2 cache, halved comparing to that of Athlon FX-53. At the moment, this processor is supported by VIA K8T800 Pro, NVIDIA nForce 3 Pro 250, and SiS755, so there´s enough boards already:

• ASUS A8V Deluxe
• Elitegroup Photon KV2
• Gigabyte GA-K8VNXP-939, GA-K8NSNXP-939
• ABIT AV8

It´s clear that this list will be significantly longer with time, and we´ll be informing you on the new products, of course.

As for the max. power consumption of 3800+, it´s expected to be 89W — the same as that of Athlon FX-53. In other words, there´s a possibility of using coolers with the same latches. And though some testers say that Athlon FX-53 coolers don´t fit Socket 939 perfectly, we in our lab use Thermaltake Venus 11+ without any problems.

Speaking of prices, these are actually only rumours. According to the latest information from Planet3DNow.de, Athlon 64 wholesale prices will be about $720 for Athlon 64 3800+ and about $500 for Athlon 64 3500+.

More details on this processor and its prospects are available in our (timely:) article.

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