AMD Radeon HD 7000 1 GB 64-Bit GDDR3 Directx 11 Graphics Card based on “Southern Islands”, is further products series in the family of Radeon GPUs developed by AMD. AMD builds Southern Islands series graphics chips based on the 28 nm manufacturing process at TSMC. The primary competitor of Southern Islands, Nvidia‘s GeForce 600 Series (also manufactured at TSMC), also shipped during Q1 2012, largely due to the immaturity of the 28 nm process.
28 nm product line is divided in three dies (Tahiti, Pitcairn, and Cape Verde), each one roughly double in shader units compared to its small brethren (32, 20, and respectively 10 GCN compute units). While this gives roughly a doubling of single-precision floating point, there is however a significant departure in double-precision compute power. Tahitihas a maximum ¼ double precision throughput relative to its single precision throughput, while the other two smaller consumer dies can only achieve a 1/16 ratio. While each bigger die has two additional memory controllers widening its bus by 128 bits, Pitcairn however has the same front-end dual tesselator units as Tahiti giving it similar performance to its larger brethren in DX11 tessellation benchmarks.
Codenamed Tahiti, the Radeon HD 7900 series was announced on December 22, 2011. Products include the Radeon 7970 GHz Edition, Radeon HD 7970 and Radeon HD 7950. The Radeon HD 7970 features 2048 usable stream cores,[A] whereas the Radeon HD 7950 has 1792 usable stream cores, as 256 out of the 2048 cores are disabled during product binning which detects defective areas of a chip. The cards are the first products to take advantage of AMD‘s new “Graphics Core Next” compute architecture. Both cards are equipped with 3 GB GDDR5 memory and manufactured on TSMC’s 28 nm process. The Tahiti GPU is also used in the Radeon HD 7870 XT, released November 19, 2012. In this case one quarter of the stream processors are disabled, giving 1536 usable cores. Additionally, the memory interface is downgraded from 384-bit to 256-bit, along with a memory size reduction from 3 GB to 2 GB.
Codenamed Pitcairn, the Radeon HD 7800 series was formally unveiled on March 5, 2012, with retail availability from March 19, 2012. Products include the Radeon HD 7870 and Radeon HD 7850. The Radeon HD 7870 features 1280 usable stream cores, whereas the Radeon HD 7850 has 1024 usable stream cores. Both cards are equipped with 2GB GDDR5 memory (some 7850s offer 1GB) and manufactured on TSMC’s 28 nm process.
Codenamed Cape Verde, the Radeon HD 7700 series was released on February 15, 2012. Products include the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition and Radeon HD 7750. The Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition features 640 stream cores based on the GCN architecture, whereas the Radeon HD 7750 has only 512 usable stream cores. Both cards are equipped with 1 GB GDDR5 memory and manufactured in 28 nm. On March 22, 2013 another card, Radeon HD 7790, was introduced in this series. This card is based on the Bonaire architecture, which features 896 stream cores using 2nd Generation GCN technology, an incremental update. On May 2013, AMD launched the Radeon HD 7730, based on the Cape Verde LE graphics processor. It features a 128-bit memory bus, 384 stream cores, 8 ROPs, and a core clock speed of up to 800 MHz. The HD 7730 came with GDDR5 and DDR3 variants, running on memory clock speeds of 1125 MHz and 900 MHz, respectively. Load power usage was lowered by 14.5% (47W) compared to the Radeon HD 7750 (55W).
A Radeon HD 7750 card, using a fanless design.
HD 7790 model is designed more like the 7800/7900 models rather than the 7700 featuring 2x primitive rate instead of 1x which is found in the other 7700 cards.
Bonaire XT is the only card in the 7000 series to support True Audio.