AMD had an impressive start of 2012, but has slowed down since and is still trying to move its latest Southern Islands family. Sales have been slow and problems are both in the pricing and the competition from NVIDIA. Something AMD is said to counter with three new models, including HD 7990.
AMD Radeon HD 7990 will be the official response to the high-end card GeForce GTX 690 that NVIDIA launches this Spring. We are talking dual graphics circuits and even if there are no sure details it will have two Tahiti XT GPUs with up to 6GB GDDR5 memory. The launch of Radeon HD 7990 has been delayed and one of the few advantages for AMD is that it has a clear view of where to place its new card. According to 3DCenter.org the launch of Radeon HD 7990 is slated for August.
AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is a new product name that has been around the rumor mill. This is just a faster version of Radeon HD 7970 where the Tahiti XT circuits has been upgraded from 925 MHz to at least 1 GHz. This will be sold in direct competition with NVIDIA’s flagship GeForce GTX 680 that is currently the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the market. The tuned version of the top model may appear as early as June, but exactly when is still unclear.
AMD Radeon HD 7930 is the last and laeast expected addition to the Radeon HD 7900 series. This is most likely a new GPU, Tahiti LE, that is made with 28 nanometer but gets fewer Radeon cores and texture units than the faster siblings. The exact numbers and specifications has not been revealed. Extra interesting will be how and where AMD will position the cards since it is already little that separate Radeon HD 7950 from Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition. Also the launch date is unknown, even if it will most likely be in July.
Source: 3DCenter.org
