ATI/AMD Radeon HD Series Cards Gain Middle Ground

I don't fully comprehend the numbering system for products where a significantly higher number equates to a significantly mid-level performing product. But whatever, ATI's 3800 series of their HD graphics cards will be released in November and they are all going to hit somewhere between the HD2600 and they HD2900.

The differences are fairly significant too, there are smaller process processors at 55nm, down from 65 on other units, 320 stream processors, and a 256-bit memory pathway. The top end cards are aimed quite squarely at the nVidia 8800 GT that is coming out soon.

The top end card of this series will be the 3870 and it will have an amazing 825MHz processor and half a gig of memory (I presume DDR3 or better) to work with. The bottom end will hit at 668MHz and half the memory, the upside to this car is, it will only take up one slot instead of 2. There was also news of a new version of Crossfire allowing for up to 4 cards to work together. 4 of those 3870 cards would crank out more memory, and more processing power than my computer, just set that up and install the software that allows you to use your graphics card for offloading PC functions, especially calculations, and you'd be on your way to a semi decent single box supercomputer.

ATI Radeon HD 3800 series due in November [via electronista][First Look]ATI RadeonHD3800 [via tomshardware Taiwan]