AMD Radeon HD 7950 specs leaked, price still unknown

Last week, AMD launched the Radeon HD 7970 as the first member of its 'Southern Islands' GPU family based on the 28nm 'Tahiti' core. The new card is expected to hit the market in January 9 just ahead of CES with a price tag of $549. But along with the new flagship card the company is expected to bring another -- and potentially more attractive in terms of price / value -- product to the table: the Radeon HD 7950.

Whereas the Radeon HD 7970 is based on the Tahiti XT, the HD 7950 features the scaled down Tahiti Pro variant that will be the direct successor to the Cayman Pro silicon inside the Radeon HD 6950. AMD has remained tight-lipped on the upcoming card's specs, but as usual, some details have found their way online.

According a slide posted by Donanim Haber, the Radeon HD 7950 will come with 4 compute units disabled compared to the HD 7970, bringing the number of stream processors down from 2048 to 1792. These will be accompanied by 112 texture units, while the 384-bit memory interface and 3GB of GDDR5 memory remains unchanged -- though memory is clocked at at around 5,000MHz. Lastly, AMD will also maintain the same display output configuration on this card with one dual-link DVI, one HDMI 1.4a and two mini DisplayPort 1.2.

Unfortunately the core clock speed, the exact memory clock speed, and target price-point remain unknown at this point. Power consumption figures were also kept under wraps, but the card is expected to feature the same ZeroCore technology as the HD 7970 that can shut off virtually every aspect of Tahiti and bring power consumption down to under 3W when in a long idle state.

AMD announces Radeon HD 7970, claims fastest GPU title

AMD has officially announced its first ever 28nm-based graphics card: the Radeon HD 7970. The first member of the 'Southern Islands' GPU family is based on the 'Tahiti' core and utilizes a fresh architecture AMD refers to as "Graphics Core Next." The latter introduces a non-VLIW SIMD engine and is claimed to deliver a big improvement in performance per square millimeter of GPU space over the prior generation.

Spec-wise, the Radeon HD 7970 packs 2048 Stream Processors, 128 Texture Units, 32 ROPs, a core clock of 925 MHz, a 384-bit memory interface, and 3 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 5500 MHz. It has the highest transistor count of any GPU yet at 4.31 billion and offers massive improvements over the previous single-GPU flagship -- 3.79TFLOPs of theoretical computing performance compared to 2.7TFLOPs for the Radeon HD 6970, and 264GB/sec of memory bandwidth over the 176GB/sec of the 6970.

Cards in the 7900 series can make full use of the newest and speediest PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 x16 bus interface, though they will retain backwards compatibility with both 1.0 and 2.0 standards.

Other enhancements include PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power technologies, which allow for higher performance levels while maximizing power efficiencies, App Acceleration to improve HD video playback and general performance, and an update to AMD's Eyefinity technology that brings new monitor configurations (up to 5-by-1 landscape and portrait with  2560 x 1600 monitors), flexible bezel compensation, stereoscopic 3D support across three displays and support for up to five independent audio streams.

AnandTech tested AMD's newest card and summarizes its gaming performance and power usage like this: "Depending on the game being tested it’s anywhere between 5% and 35% faster than NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 580, averaging 15% to 25% depending on the specific resolution in use. Furthermore thanks to TSMC's 28nm process power usage is upwards of 50W lower than the GTX 580, but it’s still higher than the 6970 it replaces."

The reference AMD Radeon HD 7970 card features a dual-slot cooler which uses vapor chamber technology, has CrossFireX support, and includes four display outputs: one dual-link DVI, one HDMI 1.4a and two mini DisplayPort 1.2. It'll arrive in January 9 just ahead of CES with a price tag of $549.

AMD's mid-range Radeon HD 7770 poses for the camera

Pictures of AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7770 mainstream graphics card have leaked online courtesy of a forum member at Rage3D. The new card is based on the 28nm Cape Verde GPU, which is a direct replacement for Juniper, and represents the first major upgrade to the Radeon HD 5770 in two years since the last generation Radeon HD 6770 was basically a rebrand based on the same GPU core as its predecessor.

The shots were not accompanied by technical specifications but there are a few things we can take away from looking at the card. The Radeon HD 7770 looks rather similar to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 460, with a dual-slot design and a large diameter fan in the middle pushing air down vertically.

The GPU itself is quite small and Fudzilla ventures to guess it should measure up at under 150mm2. The reference card includes the usual three display outputs -- DVI, HDMI and miniDisplayPort. A single 6-pin PCI-e is used to power the card, suggesting a TDP below 150W, and possibly close to 100W according to reports. There's also a single Crossfire connector for up to two-card configurations and the four GDDR5 memory chips on the exposed PCB indicate a possible 128-bit memory interface.

According to Fudzilla, the Radeon HD 7700 series is scheduled to arrive sometime around mid-February. The Cape Verde GPU powering these cards will be based on AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture, while everything below the series is expected to be rebrands of the VLIW5 HD 6000 family with few minor tweaks.