AMD Radeon HD 7900 with Latest XDR2 Rambus Memory

A leaked AMD next-gen road map revealed what could possibly be the company's upcoming Radeon GPU roster for this fall. Initially consisting of new GPUs, these will be manufactured using the 28nm VLIW4 architecture & utilize GDDR5 memory. However, the high-end 7900 cards codenamed "Tahiti" will be armed with the much faster XDR2 memory interface, which AMD claims is times as quick as that of GDDR5, & consume 30 percent less power. Both the Radeon HD 7970 & 7950 also come equipped with an immense bandwidth of 32 GB/s, thanks to the PCIe Gen3 interface. The flagship Radeon HD 7970 has 2,048 Radeon Cores, 1,000 MHz GPU clock & 2GB XDR2 memory running at 8,000 MHz. Furthermore, the VLIW4 architecture present in the mainstream 7000 series will get replaced in favor of AMD's new Graphics CoreNext GPU architecture. The 7970 is expected to consume an average of 190 watts of power, which is 60 watts lower than the Radeon 6970's average power consumption. These are all impressive specs to be positive, but they won't be seeing the 7970 & 7950 cards strut their stuff until Q1 2012, at the earliest. All the same, AMD's next GPU salvo lines up much with its much anticipated 8-core Bulldozer FX CPUs, which ought to be obtainable Q4 2011.