What Chips Are On The Table For Intel, AMD At CeBIT?

Hawk-eyed Web surfers got first looks in recent days at what might be Advanced Micro Devices' next high-end graphics card and Intel's upcoming 3.33GHz addition to its Core i7 processor lineup, a possible preview of what the two chip makers will be showing at next month's CeBIT technology show in Hannover, Germany.

Salland, a Dutch PC components e-tailer, last week reportedly posted a pre-order listing for an "ATI Radeon HD 5870 X2" on its Web site before taking the item down on Tuesday, according to The Guru of 3D. AMD's current top consumer graphics card is the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, and because GPU product development schedules are not detailed in advance the way CPU road maps are, not much is known about the successor to AMD's current Radeon R700 line of GPUs.

The ATI Radeon HD 5870 X2 reported to have been listed seems likely to be the first part we've seen in the upcoming Radeon R800 lineup, which was first referenced at AMD's Technology Analyst Day in July 2007 as "R8xx." Most speculation on the release date of a dual-chip part code-named R870 has focused on June 2009, but the accidental posting on the Dutch site suggests a possible earlier release.

The 5870 X2 seen on the Salland site listed an 800MHz core clock and memory (GDDR5) frequency at 4,800MHz, according to reports -- up from 750MHz and 3,600MHz for the 4870 X2. The 5870 X2 was reportedly priced at 670 euros ($861) before being scrubbed from the e-tailer's Web site -- twice the price of many 4870 X2 cards, leading many to speculate the 5870 X2 price was either in error, a placeholder or even a joke.

Other speculation about the R800 generation, neither confirmed nor proved false by the reported 5870 X2 listing: AMD's GPU process technology, currently at 55nm, will transition to 40nm starting with the new generation, and the R870 will have 2,000 stream processors, support DirectX 11 and possess 1,024 MB of DDR5 memory. It's also rumored that the R800 GPUs will be the first to get AMD's proposed "Fusion" treatment, which integrates CPU and GPU functionality in a unified core architecture, though that technology isn't expected to appear until 2010 at the earliest.

Meanwhile, some overclockers have apparently got their paws on Intel's upcoming bump to its Nehalem-class desktop processor lineup, as spotted by CDRinfo.

The Core i7-975 Extreme Edition boasts a native clock of 3.33GHz, suggesting very promising yields for Intel's Nehalem silicon, which debuted in three Core i7 chips topping out at 3.2GHz last November and will be added to the chip giant's Xeon stable of server parts in the coming months. Like the first three Core i7s, the Core i7-975 has 8 MB of L3 cache.

The best news for Intel -- overclockers Mikeguava and Fugger, cranking their Core-i7 975 to nearly 5.3GHz, on Monday posted a new record score for the Futuremark 3DMark05 benchmark. The pair's 47,026 score beats out the 45,474 achieved by AMD and Team Finland on a Phenom II X4-based system at CES earlier in the month. The AMD team does still hold the record for overclocking a quad-core x86 processor, spinning their 45nm Phenom II part up to 6.5GHz on liquid helium, and it should probably be noted that both the Core i7 and Phenom II systems that now stand first and second on the 3DMark05 list relied on ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards.

And just as a teaser, Team Finland's Samsa has posted a partial screen shot at the XtremeSystems Forums of an apparent Phenom II 3DMark05 session with "DDR3" ticked in the CPU window, but without showing a 3DMark05 score. Like the Core i7-975, AMD's AM3 socket boards supporting dual-channel DDR3 memory have not yet been released.

This arms race looks like it's just getting started.