RV790: AMD is the first to ship a 1 GHz graphics processor
Another record is linked to AMD's name.
After AMD was the first in the world to offer a microprocessor with a clock speed of 1 GHz nine years ago, the company set another record the other day, as the factory-overdriven version of the RV790 is also a milestone in the history of Advanced Micro Devices. The new release of the 850 MHz graphics core will boast a 1 GHz clock despite air cooling, which will of course be equally available to all partners, so there will certainly be more HD 4890s on the market with a GPU of at least 1000 MHz in the future. en act.
However, reaching or exceeding the psychological limit of 1 GHz, narrowed down to AMD and ATI, respectively, can be divided into four chronological chapters:
- 1999, Las Vegas: AMD, in collaboration with a refrigeration specialist, specifically Prometeia, demonstrated what kind of hidden backup can be lured from an originally 650 MHz Athlon 650 CPU using heat chamber cooling technology; this was the first time a microprocessor clock reached 1 GHz.
- March 2000, 6: The Athlon 1000, codenamed Magnolia, was the first commercially available processor to be clocked at 1000 MHz.
- October 2005, 6: Two young Finnish men, Sampsa Kurri and Ville Suvanto, performed an extreme tuning on an ATI Radeon X1800 video card, causing the liquid nitrogen-cooled R520 GPU to go at 1003 MHz.
- May 2009, 13: AMD unveils the 790 GHz version of the RV1.
Thanks to the clock boost, the RV790's raw computing power has increased from 1,35 to 1,6 TFlops, which AMD says is 51% better than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285. The "new" RV790 will naturally be paired with GDDR5 memory with a higher clock rate, thanks to which the HD 4890 considered an opponent GTX 275 it can become a clear loser in a duel.
Incidentally, only a few manufacturers have so far offered an HD 4890 with a GPU clock approaching, reaching or even exceeding 1000 MHz:
- ASUS EAH4890 TOP (900 + 100 MHz)
- Sapphire HD 4890 Atomic (1000 MHz)
- PowerColor PCS + HD 4890 (950 MHz)
- PowerColor PCS ++ HD 4890 (1010 MHz)
- XFX HD 4890 Black Edition (1000 MHz)
- MSI R4890 Cyclone (1000 MHz)
