14 DAY TRIAL // Though Advanced Micro Devices hasn't officially promised that its new Radeon graphics card will debut this week, there has been at least one report that said this would happen, so a leak containing the specifications was expected.
What we got is even better though. Hermitage Akihabara, a website that gives shout-outs to products that appear ahead of time in Japan, has both the specifications and the confirmed release date.
There is a chance that the Sunnyvale, California-based company will release this “Bonaire” today (March 21, 2013), but it is more likely for it to happen tomorrow instead.
Bonaire is a new graphics processing unit (GPU) that has 2.8 billion transistors, versus the 1.5 billion of “Cape Verde” and 2.8 billion of “Pitcairn.”
That places it right where it needs to be: in the upper echelon of the market but not at the top.
The clock speed is 1 GHz, which combined with the 896 Stream Processors leads to some serious video computing capabilities.
Advanced Micro Devices chose to pair the GPU with an unspecified GDDR5 memory capacity, probably 2 GB.
The VRAM operates at 6 GHz, which leads to 96 GB/s bandwidth over the 128-bit memory interface.
Overall, the AMD Radeon HD 7790 has a floating point performance of 1.79 TFLOPs. That, along with the primitive rate of 2 prim/clk, makes it more similar to “Cape Verde” adapters (HD 7700) than Pitcairn boards (7800 series).
Needless to say, the silicon is constructed on TSMC's (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) 28nm process.
All the hardware runs on 85W, which makes the PCI slot's energy flow and the lone 6-pin PCI Express power input sufficient.
For those who are interested in a direct comparison, the HD 7770 GHz edition is capable of just 1.28 TFLOPs and has just 1.5 billion transistors, plus 640 stream processors.