At this time there is almost all technical data required to talk about AMD’s next Dual-GPU graphics card.
The naming scheme for HD 6900 series cards brought some changes to card positioning. Follow it, the next flagship targeted at Q2 2012 should carry the name of AMD Radeon HD 7990 after successful launch of Radeon HD 6990 – current AMD’s flagship. There is no secret that Radeon HD 7000 line-up will use 28nm process technology manufactured chips, compared to 40nm chips used for latest Radeon HD 6000 products.
| Name | AMD Radeon HD 6990 | AMD Radeon HD 7990 |
|---|---|---|
| Compute power single/double precision, TFLOPS | 5.1/1.27 | 12.16/3.04 |
| Technology process | 40nm | 28nm |
| Steam processors | 3072 | 6400 |
| TMU | 192 | 256 |
| Texture fill-rate, GTextel/s | 159.35 | 243.2 |
| ROP | 64 | 96 |
| Pixel fill-rate, GPixel/s | 53.12 | 91.2 |
| Memory bus width | 256 | 384 |
| Memory type | 4GB GDDR5 | 6GB GDDR5+ |
| Memory bandwidth, GB/s | 320 | 576 |
| TDP, full load, W | 375/450 | 300 |
| TDP, idle, W | 37 | 30 |
Moving down to technical data that is possible thanks to the new production methods. The video card is said to provide the computing power of up to 12.16 and 3.04 TFLOPS for single-precision and double precision, respectively. This gives an approximate of 58% percent increase over same capabilities of Radeon HD 6990. Performance config of the future novelty will feature around 6400 Stream Processors, 3200 SPs per GPU, which is almost two times more than Radeon HD 6970 has. Due to 384-bit memory bus combined with 6 GB of high-speed GDDR5 RAM, the memory bandwidth of Radeon HD 7990 will number an outstanding 576GB/s, of course with some help from PCIe 3.0.
The power consumption of Radeon HD 6990 was some surprise for most of people, as in some operation mode, the card can draw up-to 450W. Even the upcoming GTX 590 should will consume more than 300W. Back to HD 7990, it is said to have max. TPD of 300W at full load and therefore will only require a 6pin and a 8pin power connectors, or maybe even less, due to power specs of PCIe 3.0 standard. In idle mode AMD will make small improvement to decreasing the wattage from 37W to 30W.
The cooling system should not change much: dual-slot cooler with vapor chambers inside, that works great with HD 6990. Of course, the car will support DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.2. Other features will be the same as for HD 6990 card: AMD Eyefinity and AMD HD3D support. The set of output connectors will include DVI, mini-HDMI and DisplayPort. If one card performance won’t be enough for your needs, you can always hook up two of these card in CrossFire X mode.
Whether this info came from AMD, we can’t say for sure. Take it with a pinch of salt as it is long time before the card is released so final specs can change. Moreover, don’t expect Nvidia to be out of sight for its new flagship card.