AMD Radeon HD 9970 Specifications Speculations

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New details have come to light regarding the flagship HD 9970 part from AMD.

Some new information has been leaked regarding AMD's HD 9970 GPU, the flagship part of the Volcanic Island series. According to Softpedia, the lineup of 9000-series GPUs will still launch this year.

The information revealed is that the Volcanic Islands GPUs will be baked on a 20 nm lithography and be designed to have Gate-Last transistors.

Specifications for the HD 9970 include 4096 stream processors, four geometry engines, 256 TMUs, 16 serial processing units, and 64 ROPs. Memory will be driven through a 512-bit memory bus, and GDDR5 memory.

While there has been no official word, it appears that the HD 8000 series GPUs will be skipped entirely for desktops.

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Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

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

57 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Matsushima
    Great to hear that it will be released sometime in 2013. I hope they will not rebadge the low-end (6450>7450/7470 6570>7570 5450>7350 6670>7670) models this time.
    Reply
  • sarinaide
    Twice the HD7970's resources on a more efficient node, then a whole lot of serial processors to go with it.
    Shut up and take my money.
    Reply
  • wanderer11
    Does this mean 8xxx will only be rebranded for OEMs?
    Reply
  • Achoo22
    Absolutely nothing they leak is going to tantalize me until they start talking about pricing.
    Reply
  • Nephilim_17
    amazing!
    Reply
  • aggroboy
    The chip is called Hawaii, and the actual Hawaii Islands were formed by volcanic activity.
    Hopefully Steamroller will be out around the same time to form a dream pair.
    Reply
  • Giordano Squadroni
    This is Amd 8000 series:
    http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/8000/pages/8000-series.aspx#2
    Reply
  • alyoshka
    Are you sure about the news.....
    Seems TPU's very reliable btarunr has a little something different to say about this and a little before you named if as the 9XXX Series.
    http://www.techpowerup.com/183704/amds-answer-to-geforce-gtx-700-series-volcanic-islands.html
    Reply
  • Steveymoo
    Why bother skipping a generation naming convention? Is this meant to be a cheap trick to fool fools?
    Reply
  • blubbey
    So essentially it's a 7990 on a single GPU? Hopefully every other card is improved that much (mostly double in specs, like streams and TMU's). So iirc that'd be a 9750 being about a 7850 and a 9850 being about a 7970. Do want.
    Reply