VGA ATI Releases The World's First 40nm Month April

AMD/ATI recently introduced the Radeon HD 4800 line-up of graphics cards, featuring the 55nm RV770 core. The cards have only just become available, but there are a lot of rumors on the RV770's successor already. It's been known for a while that the RV870 would be a die-shrink of the RV770, in other words, a smaller production process with the same architecture. AMD/ATI has now announced that the smaller process will be the 40nm one.

The 40nm RV870 3D-chip is codenamed Lil Dragon, AMD/ATI claims twice the performance-per-Watt compared to the RV770. Lil Dragon would be about 20% faster than it's predecessor, while maintaining a lower power consumption. It's rumored that the RV870 chip will feature 960 stream processors, the current RV770 has 800 of those.