AMD offers ATI Radeon HD 4890 at 1GHz
updated 04:40 pm EDT, Wed May 13, 2009
ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GHz
In a rare move of its own, AMD today launched a factory-overclocked version of its ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics chipset. The move takes the 850MHz core clock speed of the standard edition and boosts it to 1GHz, rendering the new version the first graphics processor of any kind to reach the milestone. AMD claims that the simple shift boosts the peak computing power from 1.36 teraflops to 1.6 and is theoretically faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285.
Despite the extra power, AMD says the new 4890 can still run on fan cooling rather than liquid and theoretically allows more on enthusiast video cards that opt for more exotic cooling or other overclocking-friendly techniques. For Windows users, video cards are available through third-party builders like ASUS, MSI and XFX. Support for other operating systems isn't mentioned as part of the immediate launch.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Oct 2006
Pointless distinction
It is sort of silly for AMD/ATI to claim any distinction by being the first to reach a core clock > 1 GHz. NVIDIA's GPUs use a two clock system, where the "core" clock is slower than the "shader" clock. The shader clock actually controls the floating point units doing all the work, and has been > 1 GHz on NVIDIA chips at least since the 8800 GTX.
What actually matters is total floating point performance, and in this case AMD/ATI does have the edge. No need to clutter up the press release with non-achievements.