Rumor: 1GHz+ AMD Radeon HD 7990 Dual-GPU and HD 7790

Since NVIDIA has such a big beast of a card on the market now, Advanced Micro Devices is bound to respond somehow, and while a reference HD 7990 may finally be in the works, so is the HD 7790.

Even before NVIDIA finally launched the GeForce GTX Titan graphics card, AMD was rumored to be preparing new HD 7000 cards for the first half of 2013. While the Radeon HD 8000 series of GPUs won't be out before later in the year (2013), AMD can't exactly leave the GPU market hanging. That means new Radeon HD 7000 adapters, and Guru 3D thinks it may have discovered two of the most likely impending products. A dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990 is one candidate. While there are several dual-HD 7970 cards on the market, they are original designs by OEMs. AMD doesn't have a reference card. One such adapter would have both chips operating at above 1 GHz and would have the codename Malta. The source of this rumor hasn't always been right in its speculations, but it might be this time.

The other graphics card that AMD is supposedly preparing is called Radeon HD 7790 and will serve the mid-range market segment. The graphics processing unit powering it has the Bonaire XT codename and will have a performance close to that of the HD 7870. AMD will allow its partners to release custom versions of it, but will forbid all factory overclocking for some reason. The base frequency is unknown. The arrival date, for the HD 7790 at least, has not been given, but the ETA (estimated time of arrival) is the first half of this year (2013), which could mean anything from now to the end of June.

Knowing how much time passes between a rumor and its confirmation or invalidation, there is a fair chance of late May or April being the intended period.

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Image credits to AMD

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