AMD to Launch Three 28nm Radeon HD 7000 GPUs by March 2012

During the course of the coming months, AMD is expected to increase its lineup of Radeon HD 7000 graphics cards with new models based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture ranging from the just released HD 7970 to the HD 7750.

The first card to arrive after the Radeon HD 7970 announced earlier this month is the HD 7950 that is based on the same Tahiti GPU, but this time coming with some of its Compute Units disabled.

As we have detailed previous, this move will leave the Tahiti Pro graphics core used for the card with 1792 shaders, 112 texture units, and 32 ROP units while its frequency will be limited to 900MHz.

Just as it’s the case with the HD 7970, the 3GB of video buffer installed in this card is connected to the GPU via a 384-bit wide bus, but this time the memory operating clock was decreased to 1250MHz (5GHz data rate).

Pricing for the card will be set at $449 (343 EUR), but as Fudzilla reveals a cheaper version with just 1.5GB of memory will arrive until March hits, which could prove to be a much better option for price conscious buyers.

Moving a little bit lower in AMD’s graphics card lineup we find the 245 square millimeter Pitcairn GPU that will be sued for the Radeon HD 7870 and HD 7850 graphics cards expected to arrive in February of next year.

Both of these will include just 1GB of video memory and will be priced at $299 and $219 (229 and 167 EUR), respectively.

Finally, the last two solutions to be unveiled by AMD will be the Radeon HD 7770 and HD 7750, which are both based on the 164 square millimeter Cape Verde chip.

According to Fudzilla, the more powerful Cape Verde XT version of the GPU, which will be used in the Radeon HD 7770, will include 896 stream processors, 56 texture units and 16 ROPs. Pricing for the card is not yet known, but its smaller sibling will end up costing $149 (about 114 EUR).

The end of Q1 2012 won’t however mark the end of the Graphics Core Next product launches for AMD as some LE editions of Tahiti and Pitcairn are expected to come out in the second quarter of the year, but little is known about these solutions at this point in time.

Posted in: Hardware, News, Preview