ATI 5770 details leak through

Midrange 5xxx series anyone?

It seems that a few sites have managed to jump the gun on the press embargo for Juniper, AMD's mainstream graphics chip that wasn't supposed to be announced until 13th October. Only it wasn't.

The Juniper details have been made public at Madbox PC in Spain, which has published slides from the presentation deck. The cards included in the slideware are the HD 5770 and the HD 5750.

The HD 5770 is built like this: 40nm process, 800 stream processors, 1.36 TeraFLOPS of computing power, a core clock of 850MHz and 1GB of 1200MHz GDDR5 - effective 4.8GHz - straddling a 128-bit bus. The shroud is similar, if not identical, to the one seen on the 5870 and 5850 cards.

The HD 5750 is only slightly different: a 40nm process, 720 stream processors, 1.008 TeraFLOPS of computing power, 700MHz core clock and either 1GB or 512MB of 1150MHz GDDR5 - effective 4.6GHz - on a 128-bit bus too. The 5750 is naked. The cooler used is reminiscent of the later custom-cooler HD 4770 cards.

Common to both types are lower power consumption, Eyefinity support, DX11 and the Displayport+HDMI+dual DVI, just like their more expensive kindred. The cards walk a fine balance between Mainstream and Performance, according to the slideware, and cover the $159~$129 price bracket for the HD 5770 and HD 5750, respectively. Just where Nvidia was supposed to land with its own price cuts.

We've been told Juniper is expected to ship from 13th October and in higher volume than the high-end 5870 and 5850, which makes sense, as it's a mainstream part.

So before the reviews actually pop up, what can we expect from this? Well, the HD 5770 should perform like a 4890, while the 5750 should render as well as a 4870. It is that simple. Only this time you get to squeeze a few nicer effects out of the DX11 hardware.

We can't help but think that Nvidia will have to bring its cards down a rung or two on the price ladder if it wants to remain competitive against this fresh batch of ATI cards. However, you should also see AMD slashing prices on the 4870s and 4850s to clear out the shelves, so there should be good deals all around.

Now, to the Batmobile!