AMD's next generation Radeon graphics card to get a boost from GDDR5

Although NVIDIA may be grabbing headlines lately with leaked details of its next generation GeForce graphics cards, AMD isn't exactly standing still with its Radeon offerings. ATI is preparing its Radeon HD 4800 series GPUs which will replace the existing HD 3800 lineup.

While the HD 4800 Series is rumored to feature GPGPU physics and HDMI 7.1 surround sound pass-through, today we were made privy of one concrete aspect of the new cards: the onboard memory. Qimonda contacted DailyTech earlier this morning with the news that they will supply AMD with GDDR5 memory chips for the reinvigorated Radeon family.

"The days of monolithic mega-chips are gone. Being first to market with GDDR in our next-generation architecture, AMD is able to deliver incredible performance using more cost-effective GPUs," remarked Rick Bergman, AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager, Graphics Product Group. "AMD believes that GDDR5 is the optimal way to drive performance gains while being mindful of power consumption. We’re excited about the potential GDDR5 brings to the table for innovative game development and even more exciting game play."

The high-speed memory chips are 512Mbit and offer bandwidth of up to 4.0Gbps. In preparing for AMD's June launch, mass production of the new GDDR5 chips has already commenced and are shipping in volume.

"We are very proud to supply AMD with GDDR5 volume shipments only six months after first product samples have been delivered," said Robert Feurle, Qimonda AG's Vice President of the DRAM Business Unit. "This is a further milestone in our successful GDDR5 roadmap and underlines our predominant position as innovator and leader in the graphics DRAM market."

"Qimonda's strong GDDR5 roadmap convinced us to choose them as a primary technology partner for our GDDR5 GPU launch," added AMD's Joe Macri. "Both the early availability of first samples and volume shipments added great value to the development and launch of our upcoming high-performance GPU."

Source from DailyTech