AMD promised us that by the end of this year the company will come up with its first graphics cores from the HD 7000-series, and these GPUs were just announced today. Contrary to what everybody has thought however, the chips cover the notebook sector and are nothing more than rebrands of previous HD 6000M parts.Traditionally AMD has launched its new series of graphics cards at the high-end and then continued with simpler solutions until it reached the value sector.This time however things are different, as AMD has decided to start with the mobile version of these chips from the Radeon HD 7000M series which are nothing more than rebrands of their old Turks and Caicos GPUs.While most of us were expecting Southern Island products based on TSMC’s new HKMG 28nm process, the fact of the matter is that TSMC is running late with its 28nm technology as yield and production capacities aren’t where they should be to allow for a 2011 launch of such products.According to AnandTech, this left AMD in a particularly tough position as the company was concerned that they needed to get new mobile products out by the end of the year, so they were forced to make do with what they had.There are some indications that 28nm parts could still arrive until the end of the year, but a complete launch is out of the question.Moving to the parts that AMD introduced today, we see three products being released. Of the three, the Radeon HD 7600M and HD 7500M are based on the Whistler core (previously Turks) while the HD 7400M uses the Seymore XT GPU (previously Caicos).Unfortunately, details for the new 7000M parts are lacking right now but the new parts should sport higher clocks than their predecessors.All the HD 7000M parts can be configured with both GDDR5 or DDR3 memory depending on the price segment they target, and feature either a 128-bit or a 64-bit wide memory bus.Of the three series announced, the HD 7500M is particularly interesting as it comes to bridge the gap between the HD 7600M and HD 7400M by pairing a 480-shader Whistler Pro GPU with a 64-bit wide memory bus.This is of course going to hurt bandwidth, but notebook makers could still deliver some worthwhile solutions based on this GPU if they pair it with GDDR5 memory, which could enable the GPU to reach the same bandwidth as a similar 128-bit DDR3 equipped model.All the Radeon HD 7000M parts announced by AMD today should already be available in quite few notebooks, so we should be able to see soon enough how these perform in real life scenarios.
Tahiti becomes HD 7950 and 7970, New Zealand becomes HD 7990Now that we're properly introduced with the GPU core, the time has come to pay more attention to the lineup itself. Given that the memory bus was extended to 384-bits, i.e. the same as GeForce GTX 580, 3GB GDDR5 are being used across the board, and we would not exclude a 1.5GB or even 896MB "7930" part coming as the number of partially functional GPUs increases.AMD kept the unified clock concept and given that Radeon HD 7970 is based on fully configured "Tahiti XT" GPU, 2048 cores (32 Compute Units) operate at 1GHz clock. 3GB of GDDR5 memory operates in Quad Data Rate mode i.e. 1.37GHz ODR ("effective 5.5GHz"). This results with record video memory bandwidth for a single GPU - 264GB/s.The HD7950 is based on "Tahiti Pro" and packs 30 Compute Units for 1920 cores operating at 900MHz. The number of ROPs decreased to 60, while Texture units naturally reduced to 120 (as every CU connects to 2 ROPs and 4 TMUs). Our sources did not disclose if the memory controller is still 384-bit or a 256-bit one, but the memory clock was decreased to 1.25GHz, i.e. the same clock as previous gen models. Should 384-bit controller stay, the clock should be good for 240GB/s of bandwidth.Both products are expected to be released on CES 2012 in Las Vegas, NV, occupying the $349-449 price bracket. Those additional gigabytes of memory (and processing cores) will certainly cost a lot of $$$.As far as the dual-GPU "New Zealand", 6GB GDDR5 is expected to be clocked on the same level as the HD6990/7970, meaning you will be getting full performance out of the dual-GPU part.Unlike HD7950 and HD7970, Radeon HD 7990 will debut in March 2012 and the target price is the same as the original price of its predecessor - $699.
and i am tomy 9800gtx+ is covering phys-x....still issues are none existent..emperor go never let it go that i am afraid to tab in and out of bf3...i am afraid of it crashing man, hate losing my spot thats all..nothing with ati or drivers.
Rebranded parts from last generation masquerading as new parts with a fresh sticker on them? Hell I could think of another green coloured graphic card maker that are experts at this as well!But on another note..Amd's hardware always sounds very promising on paper but in reality1) lack of proper quality control on the part of their board partners resulting in simple stupid things like malfunctioning cooling fans after very short time periods (happened to me twice, different brands)2) poor drivers especially in multiple cpu configs,3) poor "legacy" support as in ONE generation behind 4) slow updates and general stability of driver code (or lack thereof)....was and CONTINUES to be a major barrier to AMD's success over their competitors who, while not perfect, in my experience are miles ahead in the above mentioned aspects.Until that changes, AMD will not see another red cent from me, no matter how financially competitive their products are.
never saw point in dual. 1 card works fine.
