Set to become the fastest graphics card ever built

Dec 22, 2011 23:01 GMT  ·  By

Soon after the introduction of the Radeon HD 7970 and HD 7950, AMD will release the now mandatory dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990 graphics card which makes use of the company’s just introduced Tahiti GPU based on the Graphics Core Next architecture.

The HD 7990 will arrive by the end of the first quarter of 2012, according to a slide published by Donanim Haber, and will most probably be built using two Tahiti XT graphics cores which will be linked together via CrossFireX.

If AMD will indeed go for the Tahiti XT, this could mean that the card will include 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.

The clocks that the memory chips or the two GPUs will run at are unknown, but most probably AMD will have to go lower than the 925MHz/1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective) frequencies used for the HD 7970 in order to decrease the power consumption and the heat output of this dual-GPU monster.

The good news for AMD is that thanks to its ZeroCore technology the HD 7990 can completely shut down the secondary GPU when not in use.

So far, no details regarding pricing were uncovered, but given the $549 (420 EUR) MSRP of the HD 7970, this dual-GPU Radeon is expected to cost a pretty penny.

As most of you should know by now, earlier today AMD unveiled its first graphics card based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, the Radeon HD 7970.

In the short time past since it’s announcement, the graphics card has received some positive reviews as it proved to be the highest performing single-GPU solution is existence today, surpassing Nvidia’s GTX 580 by 15 to 25 percent on average.

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