14 DAY TRIAL // Rumors regarding AMD’s launch of the next-generation Radeon HD 7900 graphics cards have been circulating around the Web for quite some time now, but all these were put to rest by a recent report that places the release of these GPUs on January 9.
This date was unveiled by the Donanim Haber website, which has received an invitation to AMD’s launch event for the HD 7900 series.
The invite doesn’t unveil any other info regarding the GPUs that are going to be announced by AMD, but from previous reports we know that the Radeon HD 7900 line will comprise two solutions, both of these based on the Tahiti core.
The faster of the two cards, the Radeon HD 7970, will use the full version of the Tahiti core, aka Tahiti XT, which is believed to include 32 Compute Units for a total of 2048 cores that operate at a 1GHz clock.
These will be linked via a 384-bit wide memory bus to 3GB of GDDR5 VRAM working in a quad data-rate mode at 1.37GHz (5.5GHz effective) in order to provide a whopping 264GB/s of memory bandwidth.
The HD 7950 on the other hand, which is based on the Tahiti Pro version of the AMD GPU, will drop two of the Compute Units of its older brother to provide its users with 30 CUs and 1920 streaming cores that operate at a lower 900MHz frequency.
The number of ROPs will also be decreased to 60, which will be paired with 120 texture units, as in AMD’s new architecture every CU connects to 2 ROPs and 4 TMUs.
As far as the memory controller included in this core is concerned, the information available is a bit sketchy as it hasn’t been revealed whether this is 384-bit or 256-bit wide, but we do know that the memory clock was decreased to 1.25GHz.
No official info regarding pricing is available yet, but sources cited by BSN have revealed that these graphics cards should occupy the $349-449 price bracket once they arrive.
