This really is a beast :P

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3YT21NO9OU

Eyefinity is nothing new to us, but damn look at those screens lol !
HD6870 is not top of the line, and the price tag isnt "expensive" either, depends on how you may interpret expensive.

But look at how smooth this HD6870 renders 3x 46" screens!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mJeefx5_Qc

Sapphire is obviously trying to sell all of her remaining HD 5830's and HD 5850's.
These are the outdated 40nm Cypress chips, but Sapphire really has a good strategy in getting rid of them:

- new cooling
- lower price

With lower price, we can understand that the HD 5830 will be sold for 95 euros and the HD 5850 for 110 euros. This means that the 5850 will be sitting between the HD 6790 and GeForce GTX 550 TI.
With the benchmarks showing that HD 5850 is obviously the faster one, this HD 5850 sure is the best price/performance.
The HD 5830 is equal to HD 6790 in performance, but with the lower price tag.

Put HD 5850's in Crossfire and you have a GeForce GTX 580 for half the price!

Source : http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/zardon/sapphire-hd5830-hd5850-xtreme-edition-review-crossfirex/

Source : http://be.hardware.info/nieuws/22810/sapphire-lanceert-hd-58305850-xtreme

AMD’s Southern Islands tapes out

Spring is here and the birds are flying north from their winter hiding spots, and they bring with them news from the Southern Islands. With the migration CIrcle complete, the words from the birds is that the new AMD (NYSE: AMD ) GPU family taped out a while ago.

The SI tapeout happened in in February, more likely earlier than later, so lets call it 6 weeks ago. For those doing the math, both of the last two generations, Evergreen and Northern Islands, taped out later in the calendar year, and the resultant chips were launched in late Q3 or early Q4.

The SI/7xxx cards are a tweaked, more effiCIent, and polished Cayman/69xx design, so they should be pretty low risk, and the spins will be minimal. If all goes really well, think 6 weeks from mid-February, or about now, for silicon to come back from the fab, then 2 weeks for testing, and 3 months for production wafers to start popping up. That would put delivery of cards to users in late July with time to spare, add 6 weeks for a possible, even likely respin, and late August is the outer bound. Since this is a pretty low risk part, we don’t expect there to be many huge difficulties with the design.

That is not to say there isn’t a huge problem lurking, and that problem is TSMC’s 28nm HKMG process. The first Southern Islands parts will be done at TSMC, with some of the later ones moving to Global Foundries if all goes well there. From what we understand, GloFo is quite a bit ahead of delivering products even if the roadmaps are neck and neck. Given TSMC’s track record at 40nm, 32nm, and shuffling of 28nm from gate first to gate last late in the game, most observers don’t think the promised timelines will be adhered to.

Edit: Had gate first and gate last swapped. Sorry.

So where does that leave AMD and Southern Islands? In limbo really, the company will the semiconductor equivalent of all dressed up and no where to go. They will have the designs done, masks made, test chips tested, and likely no volume process to run them on. Release for both this chip and likely Nvidia’s Kepler will be dictated by when the fab can deliver production capaCIty 28nm wafers, not the design itself.

When will you see Southern Islands parts? Short story, some time between July 2011 and the following July 2012, depending on when TSMC delivers. The offiCIal word is still, well, nothing yet, but when there is, delve into the details before you queue up for the impending launch. Props to CIpher.S|A


SOURCE: http://semiaccurate.com/2011/03/29/amds-southern-islands-tapes-out/

By now you’re probably wondering how the Preview Driver stacks up against our most recent release, AMD Catalyst™ 11.2. We raised our baseline image quality in 11.2, so the performance improvements going to the 11.4 Preview should be pretty small, right? Wrong. Based on various configurations, resolutions and settings, our internal data still shows pretty amazing improvements!

* Up to 23% performance improvement in Aliens vs. Predator
* Up to 22% performance improvement in Batman: Arkham Asylum
* Up to 15% performance improvement in Battleforge
* Up to 72% performance improvement in Civilization V
* Up to 59% performance improvement in Call of Duty: Black Ops
* Up to 26% performance improvement in FarCry 2
* Up to 35% performance improvement in Lost Planet 2
* Up to 30% performance improvement in Metro 2033
* Up to 11% performance improvement in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
* Up to 19% performance improvement in Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

And one more thing: the AMD Catalyst™ 11.4 Preview Driver (and its official release in April) is only the first in a series of planned drivers that we hope will provide even more performance throughout 2011.

NOTE: This preview driver is only available for Windows® 7.

SOURCE: http://blogs.amd.com/play/2011/03/14/the-amd-catalyst%E2%84%A2-preview-driver-that-you-have-been-waiting-for/