AMD Launches Radeon HD 7750 GPU, GCN Goes Mainstream

After the successful launch of the 28nm Tahiti GPU, AMD has now switched its focus on bringing the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture to lower price points, a process which has started today with the launch of the Radeon HD 7770 and HD 7750.

Meant to become the successors of the popular Radeon HD 5770 and HD 5750, and their HD 6770/HD 5770 rebrands, both of these graphics cards are based on the company’s new Cape Verde GPU.

With a die size of just 123 square millimeters, the Cape Verde graphics core is AMD’s smallest 28nm GPU so far, and it’s only a hair bigger than the 118mm2 Turks GPU that powers the HD 6600 series.

From a functional standpoint, Cape Verde is made up of 10 Compute Units to deliver a total of 640 stream processors and 40 texture units which are packed together with 16 ROP units, one geometry engine/rasterizer and 512KB of L2 cache.

The Cape Verde GPU is linked to 1GB of GDDR5 video buffer via a 128-bit wide memory bus.

Even though AMD’s new mainstream GPU is built upon the same GCN architecture as Tahiti, this utilizes a slightly different Compute Units arrangement, since the Cape Verde’s 3 CU arrays are populated in a 4/3/3 manner.

This full 10 CU configuration, however, is only available in the Radeon HD 7770, while the HD 7750 has two of these arrays disabled, giving it 512 SPs and 32 texture units, but the ROP count remained unchanged at 16.

The GPU core clock is set at 800MHz (200MHz lower than the HD 7770), while the memory is working at 1,125MHz (4.5GHz data rate).

The PowerTune limit of the Radeon HD 7750 is set at 75W, while the typical board power is estimated at 55W, so the graphics card draws all the juice it requires from the PCI Express slot.

Performance wise, AMD’s Radeon HD 7750 manages to perform about the same as the previous 5700 series cards, but it does so without surpassing the 75 Watt power envelope, according to AnandTech.

The recommended retail price of the Radeon HD 7750 was set at $109 US, which translates into about 83 EUR.