AMD HD8970M Emerges on Ebay

Not long ago, AMD's upcoming flagship HD 7990 part was listed on eBay, and suspiciously, its upcoming flagship mobile HD 8970M part has also just been listed on eBay.

While previously we were under the impression that the HD 8000M series parts would be based on a new architecture, it appears that the listed HD 8970M is nothing more than a rebrand of the original HD 7970M part, with perhaps slightly higher core clocks.

It appears to still be based on the same GCN architecture and still features 1280 stream processors, 80 TMUs, and a 256-bit memory interface running GDDR5 memory. Nonetheless, the part is currently listed at $853.

The current HD 7970M features clock speeds of 850 MHz core and 1,200 MHz memory, with no boost speed. While it is likely that the HD 8970M will feature AMD's Boost technology, it would only still be marginally faster than Nvidia's current flagship mobile part, the GTX 680MX, which will likely soon be replaced.

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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

12 Comments Comment from the forums

joytech22

Man that's a lot to ask for an MXM upgrade.
$850 is a lot to ask for a "side grade". (coming from a M17X with 7970M)

Also.. Why can't I post from the comments section on almost any pages? I have to post it differently.
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smeezekitty

joytech22: The new comment system is ultra buggy
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ddpruitt

And of course everyone on eBay is the most honest person in the world.
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mouse24

I haven't had a single problem with the comment section. Maybe I'm just lucky though.
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DRosencraft

Yeah... I don't think there is any legitimacy to this thing at all. Not saying it's not something AMD would do, though it'd be horrid, but what are the chances that someone got their hands on the 8970 already and would list it on eBay? They've been working on the APUs and on the 7990.
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dragonsqrrl

10680230 said:
Yeah... I don't think there is any legitimacy to this thing at all. Not saying it's not something AMD would do, though it'd be horrid, but what are the chances that someone got their hands on the 8970 already and would list it on eBay? They've been working on the APUs and on the 7990.
The lower tier of the HD8000m series has already been introduced, which are essentially rebrands of their HD7000m counterparts. So this may not be quite as illegitimate as you might think. Remember that laptop OEM's tend to keep AMD and Nvidia on a pretty tight annual update schedule, which conflicts with ever lengthening GPU generations. The two don't always align, and unfortunately sometimes this has to happen.

That being said, somehow I doubt the higher-end HD8000m's will be simple rebrands, and not utilize AMD's updated GCN architecture. It's not unusual to see lower-end parts get rebranded given similar feature sets between 2 generations. But a high-end mobile GPU would be a little strange.
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SteelCity1981

what was wrong with the old comment system to change it in the first place?
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de5_Roy

is that a mobile version of pitcairn?
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Cataclysm_ZA

10680532 said:
The lower tier of the HD8000m series has already been introduced, which are essentially rebrands of their HD7000m counterparts.

This is actually incorrect. AMD's low-end mobile HD7000 series is actually based on VLIW4, GCN was reserved for the higher-end parts. With the HD8000 series GCN now filters into the low-end SKUs, but the high-end cards are rebranded and clocked a little higher.
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dragonsqrrl

10681859 said:
10680532 said:
The lower tier of the HD8000m series has already been introduced, which are essentially rebrands of their HD7000m counterparts.

This is actually incorrect. AMD's low-end mobile HD7000 series is actually based on VLIW4, GCN was reserved for the higher-end parts. With the HD8000 series GCN now filters into the low-end SKUs, but the high-end cards are rebranded and clocked a little higher.
Thanks for the info, I'm not sure how I got the low-end mobile rebrands mixed up. I think it had something to do with an article I read on Anandtech a couple months ago. It mentioned rebrands for AMD mid-range HD8800m, but it looks like everything below that does indeed use a new low-end GPU based on 1st gen GCN.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6571/amd-releases-full-product-specifications-for-radeon-8000m-series
I still haven't seen any definitive information about the high-end SKUs though. Could you provide a link if you have one?
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