Radeon HD5670 Final Thoughts

The alternative title for this review could have been: "Honey, I shrunk the Kids". I wonder how many more times ATI can slice the pie and still come up with a fully functional video card. There may be one more cut, for an ultra-low power solution, and God knows what kind of mischief the engineers play with the mobile solutions, but I think this is probably it, for a card that can honestly support gaming applications as well as general usage and HD video. I almost wonder if ATI didn't work backwards; take the marketing spec for the HD5670 and multiply it times 4 for the HD5870. However they did it, and trust me, someone ran the numbers; you can be sure of that, the fact remains that the Radeon HD5670 is perfectly suited for the target market.

I used to laugh at the concept of marrying the GPU with a CPU. I mean, every new CPU seemed to be bigger and burn hotter than the previous iteration. The problem was, I kept looking at the top of the pile, where 140 watts power dissipation from the CPU was not a bad dream, but a reality to be dealt with. One look at an NVIDIA GT200 chip and it was all I could do to stop from laughing out loud when thinking about CPU-GPU integration. Well, with just one generation of progress in IC lithography, from 55nm down to 40nm, suddenly, all things seem possible. Once everyone gets their feet wet at 32nm, I think there will be some products on the table that do exactly what I thought impossible last year or so. Clearly, the first chips to market won't support realistic gaming scenarios, but in one or two more generations, it could happen.

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