Building on the launched ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card, AMD announced availability of a factory overclocked graphics processor that is the first to break the 1 Gigahertz (GHz) barrier using standard air-cooling solutions.

With this product, AMD achieves an engineering milestone as the first graphics company to break the 1 GHz barrier. The announcement comes nine years after launching the world’s first 1 GHz CPU.

The new ATI Radeon HD 4890 utilizes GDDR5 memory and a 1 GHz clock speed to deliver 1.6 TeraFLOPs of compute power. With this level of raw compute power, the1 GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 is set to deliver new levels of general purpose GPU-accelerated performance in ATI Stream applications such as video transcoding and post processing.  The TeraScale graphics engine in the ATI Radeon HD 4890 features nearly one billion transistors and 800 stream processors

This new version of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 marks the latest addition to the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series. The advanced design of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 delivers an amazing gaming experience in the latest games. When compared to DirectX 10 game play, DirectX 10.1 games have proven to deliver higher game performance and an improved visual experience. In addition, these cards feature support for open standards like OpenGL3 with DirectX 10-like hardware extensions, and the recently ratified OpenCL specification.

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 features Anti-Aliasing & Anisotropic Filtering, for true-to-life graphics, from grass to facial features, ATI CrossFireX Technology, Unified Video Decoder 2, for most processing-intensive content, including VC-1, H.264 and MPEG-2, and Accelerated Video Transcoding, in order to accelerate the conversion of standard and HD video into multiple formats for use on differing consumer electronics devices.

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 supports advanced game physics. At the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Havok and AMD demonstrated the first implementation of OpenCL running on AMD graphics processors. In the demonstration, Havok’s physics technology delivered complex and realistic simulations of real-world materials like cloth, demonstrating the potential for increased realism in forthcoming games.

“The 1GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 continues that tradition by increasing the performance and compute power of our flagship single-GPU solution, ensuring a great experience whether our customers are playing the latest DirectX 10.1 game or running GPU accelerated applications built with OpenCL,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president, Products Group, AMD.

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card is supported by a dozen add-in-board companies offering a variety of custom board and cooling solutions. Technology partners include ASUS, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE, Gigabyte, HIS, ITC, Jetway, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE Technology and XFX.