14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices has finally reached the point where its “Pitcairn” GPU architecture is ready to serve mobile personal computers.
What we are looking at is the first Radeon HD 7900M series mobile discrete graphics processing unit from the Sunnyvale, California-based company.
Codenamed “Thames”, the GPU is now here, confirming previous rumors that said the launch would occur on April 24.
The HD 7970M is more or less identical, spec-wise, to the Radeon HD 7870 graphics card, although, true enough, the clocks are somewhat lower.
That won't really make too much of a difference though, not with 1,280 CoreNext stream processors.
Since we're on the subject, we may as well list all the relevant components: 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs and 2 GB of memory (GDDR5). The memory interface is 256-bit wide, unsurprisingly.
That said, the GPU has a clock of 850 MHz, while the memory works at 1,200 MHz (4.80 GHz effective, GDDR5 speed), leading to a memory bandwidth of 153.6 GB/s.
Advanced Micro Devices tossed in the ZeroCore technology, plus the Enduro Technology, which powers down the GPU when it is not needed. In such instances, the chip uses less than 1W of energy.
It is said that the Sunnyvale, California-based company has scored many design wins, which means that there are, and there will be, many notebooks equipped with it.
Most of them will probably have the option of using an NVIDIA Kepler GPU too though, which means that consumers will get to make the final decision.
All in all, with Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs driving new system adoption, NVIDIA and AMD will have to closely compete over who gets to provide the video capabilities.
There are other AMD discrete GPUs too, like the Radeon HD 7570M 1GB GDDR5, used by the HP dm4-3110tx Beats Edition laptop that is, oddly enough, already selling in China.