Radeon HD5770 Specifications

I mentioned in the introduction that the HD5770 had hardware specs somewhere between an HD4870 and an HD4890. You can see them in detail a little further below. The real story is how ATI has been able to reduce the cost of the HD5700 platform to below the HD4850. What, you say...you sneaked a peek at the end and saw the launch price? Well, launch price, and the price one year after launch are two different things, altogether. For now, look at where the four versions of the HD5000 series end up relative to their forefathers. And remember, this is all based on launch pricing...

Now let's look at the actual HD5770 specs in detail:

Radeon HD5770 Speeds & Feeds

• Engine clock speed: 850 MHz
• Processing power (single precision): 1.36 TeraFLOPS
• Polygon throughput: 850M polygons/sec
• Data fetch rate (32-bit): 136 billion fetches/sec
• Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 34 Gigatexels/sec
• Pixel fill rate: 13.6 Gigapixels/sec
• Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 54.4 Gigasamples/sec
• Memory clock speed: 1.2 GHz
• Memory data rate: 4.8 Gbps
• Memory bandwidth: 76.8 GB/sec
• Maximum board power: 108 Watts
• Idle board power: 18 Watts

Although this review is for the HD5770, the HD5750 is being released at the same time and the two cards are based on the same silicon. The HD5750 is likely built with chips that didn't meet the top clock spec, and/or had a defect that killed one of the stream processor units. As anyone who has followed the AMD product line knows, modern processors are designed with the capability of disabling portions of the die. Sometimes, it's done because there are defects on the chip (usually a small particle of dust that ruins a transistor) and all the internal sections don't pass testing. Sometimes it's done with perfectly good chips because the manufacturer needs to meet production requirements for lower cost market segments.

It's aways a delicate balance between economies of scale (building massive quantities of only one part) and the fact that you can usually meet the requirements for the lower priced product with a cheaper part. ATI has all the bases covered in this latest series of product launches; they've got the more expensive chips in the HD5800 series and the much cheaper, half-size chips in the HD5700 series. Within each series, they've got reduced spec versions that ensure that they make the most of the manufacturing yields that TSMC is able to achieve at the 40nm process node.

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