AMD Radeon HD 7970 & HD 7950 - Heading to Southern Islands with Tahiti
Setting Foot on the Southern Islands
Setting Foot on the Southern Islands
AMD has named their new GPU series the Southern Islands and its product line comprises the following GPU cores:-
- Tahiti (featured in the Radeon HD 7900 series)
- Pitcairn (unannounced future Radeon HD 7800 series)
- Cape Verde (featured in the Radeon HD 7700 series)
AMD has not announced the launch date of the Pitcairn, which is the SKU that should excite most users because of its sweetspot for performance and price for the upgrading folks. However, Capre Verde that's aimed as the new mainstream performance GPU will be launched next on the 15th of February. It will consist of the Radeon HD 7770 and Radeon HD 7750 models which are also using the GCN architecture of the Southern Islands series.
Tahiti - Offering More Memory Bandwidth
The Tahiti core is AMD's first GPU to be manufactured on TSMC 28nm fabrication process and the architecture allows it to pack in up to a total of 32 GCN Compute Units. As a result, it has a total of 2,048 stream processing units; the largest total when Tahiti is compared to the other GPUs. Its 768KB L2 cache is relatively generous and it has a total of six 64-bit memory controllers, providing its memory bus interface with bandwidth of up to 264GB/s. This is an improvement of approximately 100GB/s over the Radeon HD 6970.
Tessellation Engine Overhaul
There are two geometry engines on the Tahiti GPU and each engine sports a new ninth-generation tesellator. According to AMD, the tesellation engine has been revised to increase vertex re-use and claims that an improvement in throughput of up to 4 times when compared to the previous generation tessellation units of Radeon HD 6900.
Power Management AMD ZeroCore Style
In terms of power management, the Tahiti GPU features the existing AMD Powertune technology. Its new feature is called the AMD Zerocore and AMD claims that it shuts down idle GPUs in a multi-GPU setup when they are not in use. It's mentioned that even the cooling fan of the graphics card is turn off to save power and reduce the noise emission from the computing rig. This is definiltey useful when using the system in a non-gaming mode for example.
Users of CrossFire technology will be glad to know that the ZeroCore technology touted by AMD can help them save on their utility bills by turning off un-used GPUs in a multi-GPU environment.