AMD Radeon HD 7970 Packs 4.3 Billion Transistors – Report

AMD’s Tahiti XT graphics core, which stands at the heart of the soon to be released Radeon HD 7970, features a whopping 4.3 billion transistors, according to a recent report to hit the Web.

This is almost twice as much as Intel’s recently launched Sandy Bridge-E chips which feature 2.27 billion transistors.

What’s inside it you ask? Well, a massively parallel architecture of course that packs 32 so called Compute Units to deliver a total of 2048 streaming processors.

Some other hardware logic is also packed inside the chip, like dual geometry engines, a render back end, some L2 cache and a 384-bit wide memory controller, but as you can see from the slide provided by OBR Hardware, the largest part of the GPU is occupied by the Compute Units. 

The 4.3 billion transistors is truly a massive number, which makes us wonder where will GPU makers go from here. After all, they can’t keep on increasing the transistor count forever. 

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