14 DAY TRIAL // At least one of the fabled dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990 / 7970 X2 graphics cards has been scrapped, but people can stop worrying about them all having been abandoned.
The board we say has been canceled is ASUS's ARES. Considering ASUS's high status, and the difficulty of making dual-chip high-end cards, the move was enough cause for speculations about all such adapters being scrapped, or at least put on an indefinite hold.
The folks over at VR-Zone say no such worries should persist through. According to unnamed sources of theirs, most other projects are going forward as planned.
In fact, they are going forward so well that a limited release may happen this very month (July 2012), in the second half.
That means that the day of arrival, which even AMD's OEMs do not know, is not far off. NVIDIA should sharpen its tools and see what it can do with the GTX 690, just in case.
The specs of the dual-Radeon HD 7000 boards vary from company to company. Even the name is undecided between HD 7990 and HD 7970 X2.
We're fairly certain HD 7990 will be AMD's choice, but its partners could go with the latter, especially if they design their own models instead of adapting a reference version.
Two Tahiti GPUs will be backed by 6 GB of memory or, as absurd as it sounds, even 12 GB. The codename of the 7990 will be “New Zealand”.
Needless to say, the price of the monsters is unknown even now. Even if a leak revealed it, there is no guarantee that AMD won't change it between now and the release day.
The same goes for the specifications, with one exception: word is already out on the fact that New Zealand will possess dynamic GPU overclocking, similar in purpose (but not in operation) to NVIDIA's GPU Boost.