AMD confirms short-term GPU roadmap

Dual-GPU 3950 X2 monster planned

By Tony Smith, 14th December 2007

AMD has confirmed its graphics chip release plans, including the launch of the mainstream-oriented 'RV620' and 'RV635' GPUs, and the high-end 'R680'.

The RV620 and RV635 are "planned" to appear in January, AMD said yesterday, which is what industry moles have been saying for some time. The company confirmer they are DirectX 10.1 and PCI Express 2.0 parts, and incorporate a second-generation UVD (Universal Video Decoder) core.

The recently released 'RV670', which shipped as the ATI Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 - reviewed, respectively, here and here - essentially had a first-gen UVD, albeit one updated for the PCIe 2.0 bus.

The RV635 is expected to debut as the Radeon HD 3600 series, while the RV620 will form the basis for Radeon HD 3400 GPUs. There will be two 3600s, one clocked at 800MHz, the other at 600MHz. Both will connect to memory across a 128-bit bus, but while the slower chip will appear on cards containing at least 512MB of GDDR 2 memory, the faster ones will have 256MB of GDDR 3. As yet, memory clock speeds are not known.

The RV680 is more of a mystery - AMD said nothing about the speeds and feeds. However, it did reveal the part is single board containing two 55nm GPUs. This is clearly the Radeon HD 3950 X2 AMD mentioned when it launched the RV670, which is fabbed at 55nm. It's not clear at this stage whether the GPU die contains two cores, or the board simply has two separate GPUs attached to it - we'd suggest the latter.

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