Late last year AMD launched its Radeon HD 3000 series of mid-range graphics cards to cater for the mass market. Though the cards were successful in its purpose of creating more value in the mainstream price points, they were basically 55nm refreshes of the Radeon HD 2900 with added DirectX 10.1 and PCI-E 2.0 support.

However, if recent rumors are to be trusted, AMD’s next-generation RV770 graphics processor should be out by the end of June this year as part of new Radeon HD 4000-series graphics cards. There has been a lot of speculation about the specs of RV770, with some sources suggesting the GPU could be outfitted with a mind-blowing 800 stream processors spread out over five SP arrays (compare that to the RV670-based Radeon HD 3870’s 320 stream processors). This is only a rumor, of course, but the idea of a new architecture being released in a few months sure is welcome.