At the beginning of next year, AMD is expected to release its first graphics cards based on the Graphics Core Next architecture, and just a short while ago the specifications of the Radeon HD 7970, which is based on this design, were presumably unveiled thanks to a leaked AMD slide.
The slide was published on the
OBR-Hardware website and it seems to resemble
AMD’s standard presentation design, so on a first look we would say this is legit.
Furthermore, the specifications presented resemble a great deal the info that
BSN provided us with at the beginning of this month for the Tahiti XT
graphics core, which stands at the base of the HD 7970.
According to these specs,
AMD’s upcoming GPU will be made up of 32 Compute Units for a total of 2048 streaming cores that operate at a 925MHz clock.
The number of texture units seems to be set at 128 just as expected, but contrary to what we had expected, the HD 7970 will pack just 32 ROP units just as it’s the case with the current Cayman cores.
This seems rather strange considering that the memory bus will be 384-bit wide, so I’ll guess that will have to wait for the official announcement to see if this is indeed right.
As far as the speed of the GDDR5 memory is concerned, this will be set at 1.37GHz (5.5GHz effective) in order to provide a whopping 264GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Power is delivered through a 6-pin and an 8-pin connector and the load TDP of the Radeon HD 7970 is rated at 300W while the idle board power is rated at an incredibly low 3W.
Finally, the embargo date mentioned in the slide is January 9, which corresponds with what was revealed by a previous report.
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