AMD Radeon HD 7970 Design Details Leak Out
Turkish website DonanimHaber has leaked a few NDA Briefing slides providing details on the upcoming release of AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series GPUs.
With the release of the Radeon HD 7000 series right around the corner (though new reports put the HD 7970 around Dec. 22), we are getting more details on the new series thanks to information trickled onto the web.
The Radeon HD 7000 utilizes a dual BIOS toggle switch, as seen with Radeon HD 6900 series. The first BIOS is "unprotected", which allows users to flash their "tweaked" BIOS to push the card even further. The second BIOS is "protected", which is a backup to the default settings just in case things don't go quite right with your "tweaked" BIOS. Cooling requirements haven't seen any major changes with only minor improvements to the design.
The display configuration has changed from previous generations. The display ports are all located in one PCIe slot, which provides two benefits, 1) Gives you a full slot slot for hot-air exhaust of the cooling assembly and 2) Gives you a single slot card when implementing a water cooling solution for the cards. The card comes with one DVI, one HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort connectors. It is expected that the cards will ship with HDMI-to-DVI dongles and active mini-DP dongles.
As discussed here, the specifications for the Radeon HD 7970 were confirmed with the leaked slide by DonanimHaber.
- 4.50 billion transistors, die-area of 380 mm², built on TSMC 28 nm process
- Advanced GCN 1D architecture
- 2048 1D processing cores
- 128 TMUs, 48 ROPs
- 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, memory clock slightly below 1 GHz, target bandwidth of 240~264 GB/s
- 6pin + 8pin power connector required
- PCI Express Gen 3.0
- DirectX 11.1 support
AMD is boosting the overclocking headroom with its Radeon HD 7970. The below slide shows AMD saying "1GHz and Beyond" is capable with its new series. The reference clock-speed is not known at this time.
The Radeon HD 7970 shows a nice improvement in tessellation performance over previous generation Radeon HD 6970. The overall performance increase is roughly 1.5 times faster in the tests conducted by AMD.
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zachusaman sweet... gotta wait till nvidia comes out with their cards so these get down to decent prices.Reply -
mikenygmail Simply amazing, without AMD releasing quality Graphics cards and processors, we'd all be paying Intel $1,000 per CPU and Nvidia $750 per GPU. Thanks AMD, for providing all the best products and lowest prices for GPU's, CPU's and APU's.Reply -
zachusaman mikenygmailSimply amazing, without AMD releasing quality Graphics cards and processors, we'd all be paying Intel $1,000 per CPU and Nvidia $750 per GPU. Thanks AMD, for providing all the best products and lowest prices for GPU's, CPU's and APU's."quality processors" not really, the processor division is really lacking in quality, but they make up for it in price for the most part... right now, the AMD processor divisions best goal is simply keeping intels prices to a semi decent level.Reply -
viper666 The only thing good about it is the dual bios. How i hate when they show graphs with "x relative performance" instead of detailed numbers. Waiting for the benchmarks before i get hyped.Reply -
ct001 zachusaman"quality processors" not really, the processor division is really lacking in quality, but they make up for it in price for the most part... right now, the AMD processor divisions best goal is simply keeping intels prices to a semi decent level.Reply
I agree, there were alot of interesting architectural innovations introduced in the Itanium that I hoped would trickle down. Instead x64 is pretty weak, but at least it keeps AMD in the game and Intel cheap. -
shin0bi272 the rumored specs appear to have been accurate. So lets hope that the numbers we are seeing on the nvidia side are accurate tooReply
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-kepler-gk104-gk100-specifications-detailed-gk100-rumored-launch-q2-2012/ -
alterecho frankly, i loved the 69xx reference cards' flame design. It doesn't really matter though.Reply