ATI's much anticipated and slightly delayed Hemlock - Radeon HD 5970 is here. To be honest, there are really no notable surprises surrounding this release.

Our forum member, adrianlee, has once again created a comprehensive list of reviews across the web. However, the HD 5970 is something more. It is not just about benchmarks and numbers.


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While we are only a few hours away from the official release, there's information galore for the impatient of us. Like they did with the HD 5800 launch, Czechgamer are back with more leaked slides. First up, the final heatsink is indeed much like the HD 5800/5770, just a larger version. The clock speeds, as expected are 725 MHz and 4000 Mhz for the core and memory respectively. TDP is 294W, with an idle power of a paltry 42W! Quite brilliant for a dual-GPU monster.

The new edition of TOP500 is out - and it is a surprise to see AMD heavily featured in the fastest supercomputers. Of the top 5 supercomputers in the world - AMD products find there way into all but one. Surprisingly, we have to look at #5 for the first showing of Intel.

Architecturally, Intel's Nehalem based Xeon CPUs are vastly superior to AMD's Shanghai based Opterons. However, six core Opterons do have a core count advantage. Even with 50% more cores, the quad core Xeons often sneaks past their Opteron rivals. There are applications which prefer the higher core count - and perhaps this is something supercomputer makers consider.

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We are less than two days away from the big launch of AMD's current generation flagship - Hemlock, or to be branded as ATI Radeon HD 5970. As we know, the HD 5970 is basically two Cypress dies from the HD 5870 on one PCB, much like the HD 4870 X2 was to RV770. HD 5870's TDP does end up at 188W, nearly 30W higher than the HD 4870. Thus, to comply with PCI SIG standards, AMD have reportedly downclocked the GPU to 725 MHz and 4000 MHz for the memory. The full complement of 1600 shaders each is retained.

The TDP, as expected, is just below 300W, with Fudzilla reporting 294W. This is exactly where we would expect it to be - contrary to earlier rumours of >300W. The HD 5970 packs 40 SIMD units, 3200 shader units, 160 TMU and 64 ROP in total, with a theoretical computer performance of an amazing 4.64 TFlops.

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Turkish website Donanim Haber have discovered that Google Shopping lists the HD 5970 at $599 from ZipZoomfly. While the ZipZoomFly page is missing, this price point fits in well with the €499 price point leaked by several European e-tailers.

If you recall, the HD 5970 was originally set to be priced at $499, according to AMD's slides. At the time, the HD 5870 was priced at $379, with it's price expected to drop with competition. Even so, a dual-5870 product seemed like a bargain, and many doubted the validity of this price point.

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In a conversation with AMD Product Manager Dave Baumann, HardOCP has clarified most of questions surrounding the much-debated availability of the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series. Excess demand and limited supply has meant it is difficult to get a HD 5800 series card, even at higher prices, and even though the product has enjoyed 6 weeks of launch.

However, availability has been improving, albeit slightly and at the cost of a higher price. Mr. Baumann expects mass widespread availability by the end of 2009, assuming AIBs continue air freighting the products, which is very likely.

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Fudzilla reports that ATI's next generation will be fabricated at a 28nm process. This comes in direct contradiction of AMD's latest roadmap and previous rumours, which all suggest a 32nm process.

The release date has long been speculated as Q4 2010, so that seems likely. The next generation is codenamed "N. Islands" for now. It is unclear if Globalfoundries or TSMC will be contracted for fabrication - or a combination of the two. A 32nm process still seems the more likely, though Fudzilla feels it is 28nm. N. Islands is expected to be the first major new architecture since R600.

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Six weeks on, and ATI Radeon HD 5850 and 5870 cars are still facing availability issues. TSMC and AMD just cannot ship enough Cypress products to meet the runaway demand. As a direct result, as we expected, the HD 5800 shortage is causing delays in ATI's release schedule.

Of course, the product most affected is Hemlock or HD 5900 series. Rumoured to be releasing late-October, now Hemlock seems delayed to late-November. The reason is simple - if AMD were struggling to put out a single Cypress die, what are the chances that they will have enough for a dual Cypress product?

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Chinese website PCpop.com have unveiled a review of ATI's Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity⁶ Edition. As the name suggests, the Eyefinity⁶ variant is much similar to the standard HD 5870. The main difference is, of course, the Eyefinity⁶ Edition features six displayport outputs, so you can connect to a whopping 6 displays at the same time. Four such cards in CrossfireX, and you have a 24-panel giant display.

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As we expected, AMD is now releasing a new revision of the Phenom II X4 965, C3. The most notable feature is reduced power consumption, dropping from a seary 140W to 125W. In reality, the previous 965 was right on the boundary of 125W anyway, so the actual drop in load power is reported to be more to the tune of 10W. A thermal improvement is also expected to yield a greater overclocking headroom, though that needs to, and will be, tested soon.

In addition, there are a few other tweaks, such as official support for four DDR3 modules at 1333 MHz, and C1E is finally supported in hardware. AMD have struggled with power management, especially the original Phenom series, with slower software power switching costing big chunks of performance. Switching power states through hardware will have "virtually no impact" on performance.

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