Advanced Micro Devices has announced that it has broken the record speed for air-cooled graphics processing technology. The company boasted that the latest ATI cards are capable of hitting 1GHz, straight off the factory floor with a basic and included air cooler.

The Radeon HD 4890 PCI-Express graphics card is capable of reaching and incredibly 1.6 teraflops of computing speed through the single, stand-alone GPU. AMD are also suggesting that the devices will be able to be used to help process other tasks though protocols such as OpenCL. With the use of graphics processors as secondary processing units for general computing becoming a more common concept, the advanced clock speeds of these new ATI cards may race ahead on the parallel GPU/CPU front of software development.

"Throughout the 40-year history of AMD, we have continually focused on technology firsts that deliver superior value to the customer," said Rick Bergman, Senior vice president of AMD's products group. "The 1GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 continues that tradition by increasing the performance and compute power of our flagship single-GPU solution, ensuring a great experience whether our customers are playing the latest DirectX 10.1 game or running GPU accelerated applications built with OpenCL."