Starting in late 2011, AMD has released three different series of discrete graphics cards based on its new 28 nm GCN Architecture: Radeon HD 7900 series, HD 7800 series and HD 7700 series. Now AMD has taken the new 28 nm GCN Architecture to its mobile platform with its Radeon HD 7900M "Wimbledon", HD 7800M "Heathrow" and HD 7700M "Chelsea" release.
Taking a closure look at the HD 7000M series, we start with the HD 7900M series. Users will notice the HD 7900M has basically the same specifications at the HD 7870 GPU, except with the GPU clocked at 850 MHz versus 1 GHz of the HD 7870. The HD 7970M packs 1280 GCN stream processors, 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and 2 GB GDDR5 memory with a 256-bit memory interface. Its core is clocked at 850 MHz, with 1200 MHz (4.80 GHz GDDR5 effective) memory clock speed, amounting to 153.6 GB/s memory bandwidth. The HD 7800M is clocked at 800 MHz, with 1000 MHz (4.0 GHz GDDR5 effective) memory clock speed, amounting to 64 GB/s memory bandwidth. It features 640 GCN stream processors, 40 TMUs, 16 ROPs, and 2 GB GDDR5 memory with a 128-bit memory interface. The HD 7700M is clocked at 675 MHz, with 1000 MHz (4.0 GHz GDDR5 effective) memory clock speed, amounting to 64 GB/s memory bandwidth. It features 512 GCN stream processors, 32 TMUs, 16 ROPs, and 2 GB GDDR5 memory with a 128-bit memory interface. The HD 7900M and HD 7800M has PCIe 3.0 support, while the HD 7700M only offers PCIe 2.0 support.
AMD has provided us with some reference performance charts that show the potential of its new HD 7000M Series. The first chart shows the performance increase of the HD 7900M versus its current gen HD 6990M. In review of the chart, the HD 7900M shows roughly a 44% improvement over the HD 6990M. In the second chart, AMD shows the Tessellation performance of the HD 7990M versus both the Nvidia GTX 675M and Radeon HD 6990M. The HD 7990 almost doubles of the performance of the GTX 675M and is nearly 8-times the performance of the HD 6990M (based on TessMark benchmark). The third chart shows the HD 7000M's performance increases you can see over the CPU alone, when taking into account GPGPU and Compute (based on ComputeMark benchmark).
| AMD Reference Performance Charts |
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The HD 7000M series all feature three key elements, GCN, AMD's Enduro Technology and AMD's App Acceleration. In our initial review of the Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, we provided an in-depth breakdown of AMD's Graphics Core Next Architecture, so there is no need to expand on it for the mobile version. The Enduro technology should come in very handy for mobile users concern with power consumption. It scales GPU usage and power based graphics demand. In addition, it shuts down the GPU when not need and enables it when workload demands. Combined with AMD's ZeroCore and Power Gating technology, the HD 7000M series is setting up to be a very power efficient platform.
| Three Key Elements with Radeon HD 7000M Series |
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End-users should expect to see the HD 7900M series showing up in Dell's Alienware M17X soon, with the based model starting at $1,699 (price is based on cost difference of upgrade from the Nvidia GeForce GTX 660M).
