The Radeon HD 8970 will reportedly feature a 28 nm Curacao XT architecture, a base clock of 1000 MHz and a cut down version of the Radeon HD 7990’s cooler.
A photograph and specification sheet of the unannounced AMD Radeon HD 8970 XT has surfaced on the one and only 4Chan (thus, everything below should be taken with a veritable bucket of salt). The card appears to feature a cut-down version of the Radeon HD 7990’s cooling design that curiously seems to have left between 1/4 and 1/3 uncovered by the two cooling fans.
Also evident from the photo are two CrossFireX goldfingers that will presumably allow up to four HD 8970 XTs to be connected simultaneously and an 8-pin and 6-pin power connector.
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Header Cell - Column 0
Radeon HD 7970
Radeon HD 8970 XT
Core Architecture
28 nm Tahiti XT
28 nm Curacao XT
Base Clock
925 MHz
1000 MHz
Stream Processors
2048
2304
Raster Operators
32
48
TMUS
128
144
Memory
3 GB GDDR5
3 GB GDDR5
Memory Bus
384-bit
384-bit
TDP
210 W
250 W
Launch Price
$549
$549
Though the photograph doesn’t show any obvious signs of fabrication and the specification sheet is certainly reasonable, 4Chan isn’t exactly the most reputable source. We will be waiting for an official confirmation before we give it further consideration.
Tarun Iyer was a contributor for Tom's Hardware who wrote news covering a wide range of technology topics, including processors, graphics cards, cooling systems, and computer peripherals. He also covered tech trends such as the development of adaptive all-in-one PCs.
Not really that much of an improvement if these specs are accurate.
Hard to believe they would spend all the time engineering and validating a new chip for such a minor bump.
I am surprised at the level of improvement over the 7970--only about a 14% increase in processors--seems pretty modest to me. Saving the big guns for the 9XXX series?
There could be IPC improvements that we can't see on paper. But realistically, this is all speculation anyways at this point. Lets not get excited over something that was spewed out of 4chan.
