Today AMD attacked the mainstream market just as aggressively with a pair of
new cards: the Radeon HD 4670 and 4650. According AMD's pitch, the 4670 can
perform up to twice as fast as Nvidia's GeForce 9500 GT for close to the same
price. The 4670 is launching at $79 with supposedly immediate availability,
while the 4650 will follow later this month at $69.What kind of hardware makes
the 4670 allegedly
perform so well? AMD's new GPU has 320 stream processors, a 750MHz core
clock speed, a 128-bit memory bus, and 512MB of 1000MHz GDDR3 memory (a 1GB
variant is coming later). The 4650 also has 320 SPs, but with lower clock speeds
and 512MB of GDDR2 memory. And thanks to TSMC's 55nm process technology, two
cards have power envelopes of less than 60W and 50W, respectively.