We covered reports of a $549 launch price for AMD's flagship HD 4870 X2 2 GB GDDR5 SKU, last week, yet today brings some more information, courtesy of Fudzilla, pertaining to a launch price for the HD 4850 X2 2GB part.

Let's recap. The HD 4850 X2 2 GB model is expected to feature GDDR3 memory, versus the mightily impressive GDDR5 counterparts on its more costly sibling, whilst two RV770PRO GPUs will form the foundations of the offering. The duty of counteracting the hindrance in performance stakes, against its behemoth sibling, will be taken charge of by some attractive pricing.

We garnered some foresight from the sneak performance preview of, Intel's upcoming 2.66 GHz Nehalem microarchitecture derivative, Bloomfield CPU, that we reported on last week.

If this article, from HKEPC, citing Taiwan's motherboard industry as its source, is to be believed, Intel will launch the 2.66 GHz Penryn successor, at $284 (1000 unit tray quantities).

On Tuesday at a Blu-ray Disc Association conference in Beijing, it was announced that the Sony DADC disc replication facility in Sydney would be recieving a substantial floorspace expansion, which will enable the facility to manufacture Blu-ray discs. The production aim will be set at 1,000,000 units per month by February next 2009. Sony DADC Sydney have replicated DVD discs from the earliest stages of the format in 1998.

This will lighten the load on loaded Blu-ray manufacturing lines worldwide which have reached stretching point, leading to staggered release dates and limited numbers.

The HD 4850 member of AMD's HD 4800 series is diversifying, with AIBs finally having the opportunity to express the creativity they've had to restrain, whilst releasing reference based SKUs.

We reported on a Sapphire HD 4850 part, bragging 1 GB of GDDR3 memory onboard, only for it to be leapfrogged by a 2 GB PowerColor iteration, raining on its parade.

Yet, it bodes well that some product differentiation is appearing within the ranks. Sapphire's 'Toxic' branding is lending its glamorous name to yet another, HD 4850 SKU aiming to break out of the box. These images from Fudzilla, show it doing just that:

Amongst much wrangling and dragging of heals, Intel enthusiasts may finally be able to partake in some NVIDIA SLI goodness, or so this report from Expreview would have us believe.

Unrevealed sources have suggested that by selling its BR04 chipset to Intel, the Santa Clara, CA based company has effectively given its blessing to Intel, to incorporate SLI support into its upcoming X58 platform.

AMD's foray into 45nm CPUs is expected to set sail, at some point, during the remainder of this year. Those all famous engineering samples have been set loose again though, with the 45nm Phenom X4, codename Deneb, CPUs in 2.2 GHz and 2.3GHz flavours, being captured at ITOCP.

Here, the 2.2 GHz iteration, running with its 11.0x multiplier and a CPU-Z indicated core voltage of 1.224V, braves its shiny face for the camera:

As the launch of AMD's highly anticipated Radeon HD 4870 X2 nudges ever closer, Fudzilla claim to have found out what the retail pricing will be on these cards.

Apparently the HD 4870 X2 with 2GB of GDDR5 will hit retail shelves at $549 USD during the second half of August. In retrospect, NVIDIA has lowered pricing of the GTX 280 to around $500 USD to help soften the blow when R700 hits. But AMD's card does still look a lot more appealing; at just $50 more you're getting double the GPUs, double the memory, and supposedly up to 80% better performance than the GTX 280 (according to this brief report over at HARDSPELL).

Expreview has spotted a picture and some brief info on AMD's mid-range HD 4650 Series graphics cards over at the Chiphell forums.

The card was photoshopped to protect the source, but you still get a good idea of what to expect, and it isn't anything unusual.

All the partners' HD 4850 cards we've seen hit shelves thus far tend to be much of the reference design, but PowerColor have taken a huge step away from the same ole' approach by whacking on 2GB of GDDR3 memory. This is a huge leap from the usual 512MB, and although probably overkill, it should certainly help the card under higher resolutions where the memory buffer is more likely to be filled.

Further to that, PowerColor has also cranked up the memory frequency to 2000MHz and the core to 665MHz out of the box. The icing on the cake is the inclusion of a superior full-copper cooling solution from ZEROTherm.

Is AMD planning to overdress and take all the limelight away from NVIDIA's presumed 9800GTX+ launch next week? If this story is to be believed, the answer could be, yes.

AMD's R700 which has, just slightly, piqued the interest of enthusiasts, could be heading for a launch on July 14th, some two weeks ahead of AMD's original schedule.