AMD Announces World's First Factory-Clocked 1GHz GPU

Posted 05/13/2009 at 7:41am | by Paul Lilly

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Much was made over the race to 1GHz on the CPU front, a race AMD won with its Athlon processor. Markedly less exciting (but still an impressive feat) has been the sprint to churn out the first factory-clocked 1GHz GPU, with AMD again claiming victory, this time over Nvidia instead of Intel.

"Throughout the 40-year history of AMD, we have continually focused on technology firsts that deliver superior value to the customer," said Rick Bergman, senior VP, Products Group, AMD. "The 1GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 continues that tradition by increasing the performance and compute power of our flagship singleGPU solution, ensuring a great experience whether our customers are playing the latest DirectX 10.1 game or running GPU accelerated applications built with OpenCL."

At 1GHz, the HD 4890 is able to deliver 1.6 TeraFLOPs of computing power, or "50 percent more than that of the competition's best single-GPU solution." In terms of real-world performance, however, the HD 4890 trails slightly behind Nvidia's GTX 285 in most benchmarks, or at least it does at 900MHz (see review of Asus Radeon EAH4890 Top in the June 2009 issue of Maximum PC on page 74).

FPS jockeying aside, it's good to see AMD aggressively going after the top spot in the graphics market rather than concede the high-end sector to Nvidia like it had done with its last generation of GPUs.

Image Credit: AMD