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May will see the arrival of AMD's 'RV630' graphics chip, it has been claimed, and the company has prepared three reference card designs for the part - two of which will support PCI Express 2.0, though only the PCIe 1.1 board may make it to market for launch.

According to claims made by Chinese-language site HKEPC, the RV630 will be fabbed at 65nm, support DirectX 10's Shader Model 4.0 specification and thus be based on a unified shader architecture. So HKEPC's Taiwanese graphics card maker sources say, though none of these features are any great surprise.

The RV630's support for 5GTps PCIe 2.0 will be delivered on two reference boards, the site claims, codenamed 'Kohinoor' and 'Orloff', but availability of samples or shipping products based on these designs is not yet known.

Incidentally, Kohinoor means 'Mountain of Light' and is also the name of a huge gemstone ultimately presented to Queen Victoria when she was dubbed 'Empress of India' in 1877. It is said to bring doom upon any man that handles it, so we're assuming AMD's going to be pitching its RV630 board at girl gamers. For more, we'd recommend a persusal of the contemporary appropriate Flashman papers.

Kohinoor - the graphics card - will apparently support up to 512MB of GDDR 4 over a 128-bit bus and include an internal CrossFire connector. So will Orloff, but it's limited to 256MB of GDDR 3, again over a 128-bit bus, according to the report.

'Sefadu', the regular PCIe board said to be sampling in April, supports up to 512MB of GDDR 2, but lacks an internal CrossFire connector. All three boards have dual HDCP engines for authenticating links to multiple HD displays and doing picture-in-picture, and Kohinoor also supports video input - the other two don't.

The RV630 is said to contain AMD's ATI-sourced Universal Video Decoder (UVD) core, a design derived from ATI Xilleon digital TV processor line. UVD is the company's scheme to ensure even mainstream and lower-end GPUs have the video processing horsepower to produce 1080p HD images to its Avivo specification.

Returning to gemstones, Sefadu is a diamond mining region of Sierra Leone, while Orloff is a famous Russian diamond.

Maximum power ratings for the three boards are said to be 128W (Kohinoor), 93W (Orloff) and 75W (Sefadu).

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