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Specifications for AMD’s Tahiti GPU compiled, up to 60% performance gains

There has been much speculation on AMD’s Tahiti based graphics cards with Tahiti referring to the HD 79XX GPUs. The people over at 3D Center have compiled a full in depth look at the specifications of the Tahiti GPUs based on everything we know so far and it certainly makes for interesting reading.

4.5 billion transistors on a 380mm² die area
Advanced GCN 1D architecture
2048 1D processing cores
128 TMUs, 48 ROPs
384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, memory clock slightly below 1 GHz, target bandwidth of 240~264 GB/s

This is made even more interesting if you compare the current specifications of the HD 69XX series as listed below:

2.6 billion transistors on a 380mm² die area
VLIW4 architecture with two raster engines
1536 shader units
96 TMUs, 32ROPs
256bit GDDR5, 176GB/s bandwidth

3D Center goes on to state that based on a ‘performance index’ in which the HD 6990 gets a score of 380% it says the performance of the HD 7970 will be in the region of 330-390% meaning that a single HD 7970 card could be faster than the dual-GPU monster that is the HD 6990. It also implies that if the scaling of single to dual GPUs is similar between HD 6000 and HD 7000 then the performance of the dual GPU HD 7990 would be in the region of 520-610%, or about 40-50% faster than the HD 6990.

Source: 3D Center