Despite of the rather successful ATI Radeon HD 4000-series graphics card lineup, ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, still has not improved its market share dramatically. In a bit to boost its availability of its products as well as market share, ATI, plans to release its new product called Radeon HD 4730.

ATI Radeon HD 4730, according to numerous media reports, will be based on the code-named ATI RV770 graphics processing unit (GPU) made using 55nm process technologies. The Radeon HD 4730 is projected to feature 640 stream processors, 32 texture units, 16 render back ends and 128-bit GDDR5 memory controller. Rumoured clock-speeds for the chip are projected to be around 700MHz, whereas GDDR5 memory should work at 3200MHz, which means that performance of the novelty will be similar to the higher-end model HD 4770 despite of $79 price-point.

The forthcoming Radeon HD 4730 model should support all the technologies as the rest ATI Radeon HD 4000-series family members, including DirectX 10.1, hardware high-definition video acceleration, HDMI with audio output and so on.

The release of the model HD 4730 was conditioned by lower-than-expected availability of ATI Radeon HD 4770 graphics card that is powered by the RV740 GPU manufactured using 40nm process technology at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The latter once admitted that 40nm yields are not as high as anticipated and that the company was working to improve the situation.

According to Mercury Research, Nvidia commands roughly 66% of the discrete desktop graphics processors market, whereas ATI has only about 33%.

ATI/AMD did not comment on the news-story.

Tags: ATI, AMD, Radeon, RV740, RV770, 40nm, 55nm