AMD Announces Radeon HD 7970; Promises to be Faster than HD 6970

It’d be a huge understatement to say that AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 launch came out of nowhere, because we were given the card just last week and told that the embargo has been changed from January 9th to December 22. Wee. Those are not the kind of e-mails a tech writer likes to receive when so many other things are going on. But despite all that, the card is here, it should be in stores soon, and it looks awesome.

The Radeon HD 7970 is the first card in AMD’s new “Southern Islands” line-up, built on an overhauled architecture that’s meant to increase efficiency and performance – especially when going head-to-head with NVIDIA’s CUDA technology. “Overhauled” architecture might also be a bit of an understatement, as AMD not only is moving to a 28nm process with this launch, but is moving from a VLIW (very long instruction word) to a scalar SIMD (single instruction multiple data) design.

While great for graphics performance, VLIW is not so hot for computational performance, and a move to a SIMD architecture is expected to give AMD a major boost where GPGPU workloads are concerned. As AMD has been just about absent (in terms of marketshare) here, the company no doubt felt forced into this move. After all, many companies and institutions are moving from the CPU to the GPU, and those GPUs happen to be NVIDIA.

With this launch, AMD releases its biggest GPU ever at a mind-blowing 4.3 billion transistors. Compare that to the 2.64 billion of the HD 6970 and it seems much more impressive. Another impressive increase is the move to a 384-bit memory interface. It was rumored for some time that AMD would be moving to XDR2 memory, but alas, it’s GDDR5. There’s 3GB worth of the stuff, however. Core-count wise, we have 2,048, vs. 1,536 of the HD 6970.

There is so much new with this card both with regards to its architecture and the Catalyst driver that it will take an entire article to talk about – which is just what we’re going to do. Due to our lack of time with the card, the fact that we are in the middle of a GPU suite update and other things going on, our look at the card will be posted next week.

Pricing: $549. Compared to NVIDIA’s GTX 580 at 3GB ($589), the HD 7970 looks to be priced-right. We’ll see how it compares to that card (well, the 2GB edition) and the HD 6970 next week. Stay tuned.