AMD's Radeon HD 5670: Sub-$100 DirectX 11 Starts Today
by Ryan Smith on January 14, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
After a holiday break, AMD’s staggered launch of the Evergreen family picks back up today with the launch of the Radeon HD 5670. The 5670 marks the desktop launch of Redwood, the 3rd chip in the Evergreen family, designed to fit in below the Juniper chip that powers the Radeon HD 5700 series.
| ATI Radeon HD 5750 | ATI Radeon HD 4850 | ATI Radeon HD 4770 | ATI Radeon HD 5670 | ATI Radeon HD 4670 | |
| Stream Processors | 720 | 800 | 640 | 400 | 320 |
| Texture Units | 36 | 40 | 32 | 20 | 32 |
| ROPs | 16 | 16 | 16 | 8 | 8 |
| Core Clock | 700MHz | 625MHz | 750MHz | 775MHz | 750MHz |
| Memory Clock | 1.15GHz (4.6GHz data rate) GDDR5 | 993MHz (1986MHz data rate) GDDR3 | 800MHz (3200MHz data rate) GDDR5 | 1000MHz (4000MHz data rate) GDDR5 | 1000MHz (2000MHz data rate) GDDR3 |
| Memory Bus Width | 128-bit | 256-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit |
| Frame Buffer | 1GB / 512MB | 1GB / 512MB | 512MB | 1GB / 512MB | 1GB / 512MB |
| Transistor Count | 1.04B | 956M | 826M | 627M | 514M |
| TDP | 86W | 110W | 80W | 61W | 59W |
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 55nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 55nm |
| Price Point | $129 - $149 | $99-$129 | $129 | $99 / $119 | $60-$90 |
AMD has been relatively straightforward in designing the Evergreen family. Each chip is half of its bigger brother. This means that the Redwood chip and the 5670 is in most ways half of a Juniper/5770: half the SIMDs (400), half the ROPs (8), half the texture units (20), etc. The core clocks are also slightly changed compared to the 5870 and 5770; here we have a core clock of 775MHz instead of 850MHz as found on those cards. So on paper, the 5670 is going to be slightly less than half of a 5770 in performance.
The one hardware unit that hasn’t been halved is the memory bus – we still have the same 128-bit GDDR5 memory bus as found on the 5770, but here it’s clocked at a 4GHz data rate. So the 5670 has a higher bandwidth-to-compute ratio than the 5770 does.
In nearly chopping Juniper in half, AMD has brought the transistor count down from 1.04B to 627M. Those transistors occupy a space of 104mm2, which is understandably smaller than the 5770, but also smaller than the RV730 GPU that powers the Radeon HD 4670, the card the 5670 replaces. This smaller die brings load power down to 61W, and idle power down to 14W.
While most of the functional units have been halved, the feature set remains otherwise unchanged from the rest of the 5000 series. DirectX 11, UVD2 video decoding, angle-independent anisotropic filtering, HDMI bitstreaming, and supersample anti-aliasing are all accounted for. Eyefinity is also here, using a slightly different port configuration to continue bringing support for 3 monitor Eyefinity.
At $99, the 5670 is intended to stake out the all-important sub-$100 position for video cards, which is a big price point for price-sensitive buyers and OEMs. Bear in mind that the entire sub-$100 market encompassed 2/3rds of all video card sales last quarter, according to AMD and Mercury Research. Given the low transistor count and small die size of the 5670, we expect that AMD will have a lot of price latitude to work with going forward – as 40nm production costs and GDDR5 costs come down, this board should be cheaper to make than the 4670 ever was.
AMD considers the chief competition for this board to be the NVIDIA GeForce GT 240, which we reviewed last week. However this price point also brings AMD into competition with last year’s parts: the GeForce 9800 GT and Radeon 4850. The former is in good supply, and the latter still available enough at this moment to be a viable alternative. As we’ll see, this is by no means a slam-dunk for AMD today.
Coming from CES, we had a chance to talk to vendors about the 40nm TSMC situation, which has been a thorn in AMD’s side since the launch of the 4770 last year. What we’re hearing is that the situation is improving (which is why 5800 series cards are finally usually in stock) but that it’s still not as good as everyone would like. For this launch there are 50k+ cards, which should be more than enough to satisfy demand. We don’t expect there to be any supply issues with the 5670.
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JonnyDough - Sunday, January 17, 2010 - link
It's always good to see new cards rolling off the line that don't require me to open another coal-powered power plant in my town.PR3ACH3R - Monday, January 25, 2010 - link
The current situation with Anandtech ATI reports & coverage is absolutely absurd, & so disappointing,I do not even know where to start.
It seems like nothing is done by pros anymore at Anandtech.
From the endless 57XX Driver bugs, To the flaky incomplete & undocumented DXVA features,
To the High DPC usage in anything not 3d/dxva
all the way to the poorest 2d performance ever seen on the pc (this is not an exaggerated comment), NOTHING is discovered by Anadtech.
You have become a commercial, biased, & unprofessional, overrated site.
So there, I have done the work for you,
go check these issues & let's see when you will get the staff professional enough to analyze or even notice all the above.
529th - Friday, January 15, 2010 - link
According to benchmark reviews the 4670 idles at 9w - the way they come to this conclusion is they boot the pc without the vid card and run the psu cord through a Kill-A-Watt EZ P4460 wall socket mount that reads the wattage draw, take that number for system idle power and then run it against the system at idle with the card for a base number, then they run it through some 3D titles for total draw..7Enigma - Friday, January 15, 2010 - link
There is no marketing or business decision to continue producing the 4850. It's more expensive to make than the reviewed card, and it's making the new cards look like crap. I personally believe the Far Cry 2 data is not correct (it makes no sense), but in everything else the 4850 is significantly faster.I'm actually surprised AMD would be stupid enough to continue producing (not just selling out of existing stock) the 4850...they are shooting themselves in the foot and making their "new" product lineup underwhelming.
Hint, hint, if you are in the market for a card in this price range and don't care about power requirements or small size (ie HTPC), get the 4850 NOW. I can't imagine it will be around next month unless AMD is completely clueless (which I believe they are not).
peakchua - Friday, May 7, 2010 - link
hey im a noob on GPU'S :) is the 4850 better than the 5670? I own an imac :) with a mobility 4850, if apple upgraded to a mobilit 5750, would it be considerably faster? I tried asking apple but as usual they never reply :)JimmiG - Friday, January 15, 2010 - link
It seems not a single card in the 5-series bring you more performance at a particular price point. There's always a card from the 4-series that beats the 5-series and costs less. Why this trade off between performance and features? It's either a slower card with more features or a faster card with less features...This is completely unlike the 4-series, which revolutionized performance at every price point.
Guess things will change in, oh, about a year, when Fermi-derived cards are out at all price points...
marc1000 - Friday, January 15, 2010 - link
If we can expect the same "downsizing" that Nvidia did for the GT200, then there will be low-end Fermi's only in 2013....rjc - Friday, January 15, 2010 - link
On th first page of the article it said launch volume would be around 50k units and that is expected to be sufficient.Is that figure for US only? if it's the whole world, it works out about 1 card each for all the retail stores that sell graphic cards. Even with the price set high as it is would think a much greater supply is needed.
From here: http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/details/reboun...">http://jonpeddie.com/press-releases/det...-for-the...
The market for grphics cards is about 20m units per quarter...this card is supposed to be in the mainstream segment would think it would sell in the millions.
ChoadNamath - Thursday, January 14, 2010 - link
How is the load power 63W higher than idle when the TDP is supposed to be only 61W? It sounds like something is funky with your review sample, or AMD's numbers are just wrong.Iketh - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - link
Hey choad, let's bash AnandTech/AMD on the basis of your ignorance! YEA~!~! It's better to just ask why it's 63w than to assume.