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AMD on Monday launched a two-chip graphics card that it hopes will give it a lead in price and performance over rival Nvidia.The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 combines two graphics processors on a single board, giving it nearly double the performance of the single-chip Radeon HD 3870 introduced in November 2007, according to AMD. The latest graphics card tops a Teraflop, or 1 trillion floating point operations per second, which is the equivalent of a trillion mathematical calculations per second. AMD’s latest product would compete with Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 Ultra that starts at $630. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 has a suggested retail price of $449.

AMD’s new graphics card will also support the company’s CrossFire X technology, which makes it possible to use up to four cards on a single computer to further boost performance. CrossFire X competes with Nvidia’s scalable link interface, or SLI. AMD plans to release software to enable CrossFire X support for the HD 3870 X2 late in the current quarter. Market researcher Jon Peddie, head of Jon Peddie Research, said AMD’s new card is 170% faster than the single-chip HD 3870, making the new product faster than having two separate cards on a motherboard, which only increases performance by 150%.

Source: InfoWeek