Significantly faster than Nvidia's GTX 580 while using less power

Dec 22, 2011 07:57 GMT  ·  By

AMD launched earlier today the Radeon HD 7970 graphics card which marks a turning point for the company since this comes as its first design to use the new Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture specially designed for the GPU computing space.

Last time AMD introduced a brand new graphics architecture was in 2007 when the company released the R600 core with its VLIW (very long instruction word) GPU design that was going to stand at the heart of all the AMD GPUs released since then.

The Radeon HD 7970 launched today is however different as it moves away from the VLIW architecture and goes for a new SIMD design called Graphics Core Next, or GCN for short, by AMD .

Without going into too many details, this new Arch is primarily about thread level parallelism (TLP) which makes it a lot better for running GPU computing tasks.

Moving to the GCN implementation found in the Radeon HD 7970, the resulting GPU built by AMD features 32 Compute Units for a total of 2048 stream processors that are joined by 128 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 384-bit wide memory bus.

This is linked to 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer memory which runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the GPU’s frequency is set at 925MHz.

All the hardware logic that AMD had to cram into this GPU, makes Tahiti XT the largest graphics core ever built since it features no less than 4.31 billion transistors packed inside a 365mm2 die fabricated using TSMC’s 28nm High-K process.

According to AMD’s estimates, the HD 7970 should be able to deliver a whopping 3.79TFLOPs of computing performance, compared to 2.7TFLOPs of the HD 6970, while the memory bandwidth available reaches 264GB/sec, a significant jump over the 176GB/sec of the 6970.

 

In gaming scenarios, AnandTech has found out that AMD’s creation is on average 15-25% faster than Nvidia's GTX 580, the difference between the two growing even bigger when high resolution gaming is taken into consideration.

The good news is that all these improvements are delivered while being the most energy efficient and quietest high-performance graphics card in existence.

The impressive performance that is capable of makes the Radeon HD 7970 a particularly expensive graphics card as its recommended retail price is set at $549, roughly 420 EUR.

If you can’t decide to get one or not, don’t worry as there’s still some time to make up your mind since the Radeon HD 7970 won’t start shipping until January 9, 2012.

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AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card
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