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.





"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.
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.
http://wccftech.com/nvidia-kepler-gk104-gk100-specifications-detailed-gk100-rumored-launch-q2-2012/
Now I just did the same thing as I did when the GTX5** series was coming out, I grabbed two 470's..
Now I have a 580, maybe I'll hold off on another one and wait until Nvidia releases their competitors to the 7 series cards.
Then I'll make my choice, because in all honesty, these performance boosts are no laughing matter.
take a phenom II and an i7, in most applications the i7 is well ahead of the phenom, but keep in mind we are talking about seconds, not minutes the difference between 30 seconds and a 1 minute encode on a consumer level is negligible. but the cost of the i7 is about 300$ and the phenom II is about 100, for the i7 to be fully worth it it would need to be 300% better minimum (my math is a 100$ phenom x 300% = 300$, i may not be saying it right but that's what i mean) but in most cases, its only 2x faster, many coming down to a 1.5 level.
i don't want to get onto this topic here, but i did.
well id i'm thinking right and reading right, the die size on these things are larger than the 6990 so in all likely ness it would cost more than it.
But enough about me, I really hope that last slide about the tessellation performance is TRUE and not a marketing slide like BD. Amd Please don't fail me again make this a series Amd fans wont forget and i mean that in a Good way. Oh yeah Toms nice article as always!