As first noted in a leaked roadmap last month and now seemingly confirmed by Chinese website EXPreview.com, AMD is scheduled to release their mid-range HD 7870 and 7850 series graphics cards based on the Pitcairn GPU in March. The latest leak reveals one Radeon HD 7870 and two Radeon HD 7850 cards; one with 1GB of memory and the other featuring 2GB.
Specifications for each card can be found below.
Radeon HD 7870
- 22 Graphics CoreNext Compute Units
- 1408 stream processors
- 88 TMUs
- 24 ROPs
- Memory bus of 256-bit
- Memory size of 2GB GDDR5 memory
- Clock speeds of 950 MHz core
- Memory frequency of 1375 MHz (5.50 GHz effective)
Radeon HD 7850
- 20 Graphics CoreNext Compute Units
- 1280 stream processors
- 80 TMUs
- 24 ROPs
- Memory Bus of 256-bit
- Memory size of 1 GB/2GB GDDR5 memory
- Clock speeds of 900 MHz core
- Memory frequency of 1250 MHz (5.00 GHz effective)
According to Tom's Hardware, early pricing for the HD 7870 is in the $300 ballpark while HD 7850 cards are expected to start around $220. It's of course worth mentioning that these specifications aren't official and even if they prove to be accurate, they only cover reference cards so we are likely to see manufacturers squeeze a bit more performance out of each via overclocking. We'll likely know more come March 6 when CeBIT kicks off in Hanover, Germany.