Last week, AMD launched the Radeon HD 7970 as the first member of its 'Southern Islands' GPU family based on the 28nm 'Tahiti' core. The new card is expected to hit the market in January 9 just ahead of CES with a price tag of $549. But along with the new flagship card the company is expected to bring another – and potentially more attractive in terms of price / value – product to the table: the Radeon HD 7950.
Whereas the Radeon HD 7970 is based on the Tahiti XT, the HD 7950 features the scaled down Tahiti Pro variant that will be the direct successor to the Cayman Pro silicon inside the Radeon HD 6950. AMD has remained tight-lipped on the upcoming card's specs, but as usual, some details have found their way online.
According a slide posted by Donanim Haber, the Radeon HD 7950 will come with 4 compute units disabled compared to the HD 7970, bringing the number of stream processors down from 2048 to 1792. These will be accompanied by 112 texture units, while the 384-bit memory interface and 3GB of GDDR5 memory remains unchanged – though memory is clocked at at around 5,000MHz. Lastly, AMD will also maintain the same display output configuration on this card with one dual-link DVI, one HDMI 1.4a and two mini DisplayPort 1.2.
Unfortunately the core clock speed, the exact memory clock speed, and target price-point remain unknown at this point. Power consumption figures were also kept under wraps, but the card is expected to feature the same ZeroCore technology as the HD 7970 that can shut off virtually every aspect of Tahiti and bring power consumption down to under 3W when in a long idle state.