Starting out with the basics of the core being launched officially today, we find that RV770 follows AMD's previous RV670 part in using the latest 55 nanometre manufacturing process. While this part can't quite reach the billion transistor level sported by NVIDIA's GT200 core, it isn't all that far off, with a total transistor count of 956 million, against the 666 million transistors used by the Radeon HD 3800 series.

This increase in specification and transistors also sees die size increase over RV670 as you would expect, with RV770 clocking in at 260mm squared against the 190mm squared die of RV670. This still absolutely pales into comparison with the vast die size of NVIDIA's GT200, which weighs in at absolutely massive 576mm squared.