14 DAY TRIAL // In the first part of March, AMD is expected to expand its lineup of Radeon HD 7000 graphics cards based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture with a couple of new GPUs known by the code name of Pitcairn.
The two cores will stand at the heart of the Radeon HD 7870 and HD 7850 video cards, which DigiTimes says will be introduced in the first half of March.
While no information regarding the specs of these two GPUs was provided by the source, some previous leaks have suggested that AMD’s Radeon HD 7800 models will come equipped with 2GB of GDDR5 video memory buffer.
In the more powerful HD 7870, this will be accompanied by the Pitcairn XT GPU which includes 1408 streaming processors, 88 texture units and 24 ROP units that will all be connected to the memory via a 256-bit wide bus.
Thanks to the 1,375MHz (5.5GHz data rate) VRAM operating clock, this configuration should be able to deliver 176GB/s worth of memory bandwidth.
As far as the GPU is concerned, this will work at 950MHz, making it the second highest clocked graphics core in the Radeon HD 7000-series after the HD 7770.
For the Radeon HD 7850, AMD will decrease this frequency to 900MHz, while the memory will also be downclocked from 1,375MHz to 1,250MHz (5GHz data rate). This drops the memory bandwidth available to the GPU to 160GB/s.
Other changes brought to the Pitcairn Pro core include a reduction in stream processors count, from 1408 to 1280, the number of texture units available also being lowered to 80 from 88 in the Pitcairn XT.
According to a report published last month, the Radeon HD 7870 and HD 7850 will be priced at $299 and $249 (227 and 189 EUR), respectively.