14 DAY TRIAL // A little more than two weeks after the introduction of the Radeon HD 7970 GPU based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, AMD’s graphics card has arrived in retail, Newegg being one of the first to list it on its Website.
No less than seven HD 7970 models are listed at this time in the retailer’s store, four of these shipping right now from stock with prices varying between $549.99 and $559.99 (433 to 440.9 EUR).
All available models use AMD’s HD 7970 reference design and run the GPU, as well as the memory, at their reference frequencies.
AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 was formally introduced on December 22, 2011, and is based on the company’s new Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture designed with GPU computing in mind.
The GCN implementation found in the Radeon HD 7970, uses 32 Compute Units for a total of 2048 stream cores that are joined by 128 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 384-bit wide memory bus.
This is linked to 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer memory which runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective), while the GPU’s frequency is set at 925MHz.
All the hardware logic that AMD had to cram into this GPU, makes Tahiti XT the largest graphics core ever built since it features no less than 4.31 billion transistors packed inside a 365mm2 die fabricated using TSMC’s 28nm High-K process.
According to AMD’s estimates, the HD 7970 should be able to deliver a whopping 3.79TFLOPs of computing performance, compared to 2.7TFLOPs of the HD 6970, while the memory bandwidth available reaches 264GB/sec, a significant jump over the 176GB/sec of the 6970.
AMD’s recommended price for the Radeon HD 7970 is set at $549, and judging by what we have seen today it seems like AMD’s partners will pretty much respect its pricing policy.
Update: In the short time that passed since our article went live, Newegg has depleted all stock of Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards.