14 DAY TRIAL // AMD’s plans to release the Radeon HD 7990 have been common knowledge for quite some time now, but recently a Chinese website managed to uncover the specs of this upcoming flagship dual-GPU video card.
Expected to arrive in April, the Radeon HD 7990 is rumored to be built using a pair of Tahiti XT graphics cores, which is the same GPU as the one installed in the HD 7970.
These will be linked together in CrossFireX thanks to the inclusion of an on-board bridge chip, so the card will feature 62 Compute Units for a total of 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units and 64 ROP units.
Each one of the two GPUs will also feature a 384-bit wide memory bus that will be connected to 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer, delivering a whopping 6GB of VRAM on a single graphics card.
According to INPAI, in order to pack two high-performance Tahiti XT GPUs on the same PCB, AMD had to decrease their operating frequencies so these will run at 850MHz, compared to 950MHz in the HD 7970.
Furthermore, the GDDR5 memory frequency was also lowered to 1,250MHz (5.00GHz data rate) from 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective).
The lower operating clock speeds of the HD 7990 should also decrease its power consumption and its heat output.
For those of you still worried about the energy efficiency of the Radeon HD 7990, AMD will include support for the ZeroCore technology that can completely shut down the secondary GPU when not in use.
So far, no details regarding pricing have been uncovered, but given the $549 (420 EUR) MSRP of the HD 7970, this dual-GPU Radeon is expected to cost a pretty penny.
Nvidia is also said to prepare a dual-GPU graphics card of its own based on the company’s upcoming “Kepler” GK104 core, which will apparently be made available in May this year.