Perhaps most noteworthy amongst RV740's credentials is its place as the first 40 nanometre graphics core to hit the desktop GPU market, giving it obvious power usage and size advantages over the 55 nanometre process used by the rest of the Radeon HD 4000 series thus far. Into this 40 nanometre core is packed 826 million transistors, an obvious reduction from the 956 million sported by RV770. Naturally, as per its predecessors RV740 supports DirectX 10.1 and PCI Express 2.0, and again features tessellation hardware which won't see support in an official API until the release of DirectX 11.

Compared to RV770's 800 Stream Processors, RV740 sees a reduction to just 640 Stream Processors (as per the Radeon HD 4830 it replaces, which reached this total by having some SIMD cores disabled in hardware) - As per RV770, these Stream Processors are arranged as arrays of sixteen units (or SIMD cores), of which there are eight.