AMD Radeon HD 7800 GPUs to Hit March 2012, Says Leaked Roadmap

Besides the Radeon HD 7700 series, AMD’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) video card lineup also includes the HD 7800 range that is expected to arrive into the retail space in March of this year, according to a leaked MSI roadmap.

AMD’s initial Radeon HD 7800 series will include two video cards featuring the same Pitcarin core paired together with 2GB of GDDR5 video buffer memory.

Starting with the more powerful Radeon HD 7870, previous leaks have revealed that the Pitcairn XT GPU used for this card will includes 1408 streaming processors, 88 texture units and 24 ROP units that will all be connected to the memory via a 256-bit wide bus.

Thanks to the 1,375MHz (5.5GHz data rate) VRAM operating clock, this configuration should be able to deliver 176GB/s worth of memory bandwidth.

As far as the GPU is concerned this will work at 950MHz, making it the highest clocked graphics core in the Radeon HD 7000-series.

For the Radeon HD 7850, AMD will decrease this frequency to 900MHz, while the memory will also be downclocked from 1,375MHz to 1,250MHz (5GHz data rate). This drops the memory bandwidth available to the GPU to 160GB/s. 

Other changes brought to the Pitcairn Pro core include a reduction in stream processors count, from 1408 to 1280, the number of texture units available also being lowered to 80 from 88 in the Pitcairn XT.

According to MSI’s leaked roadmap, which was published by CPU-World, the Radeon HD 7870 and HD 7850 will arrive in March this year, pricing being set at $299 and $249 (227 and 189 EUR), respectively.

A 1GB version of the Radeon HD 7850 is expected to make its entrance later this year featuring the same specs and clock speeds as its older brother, but sporting a lower $219 (166 EUR) price tag.

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