In just two weeks’ time, AMD will introduce third and final silicon for their 7000 Series of graphics cards: Pitcairn or the RV940, as the old nomenclature would imply.
At CeBIT 2012, AMD will introduce the Radeon HD 7800 Series. The two boards will be 
based off a silicon codenamed Pitcairn (four volcano islands in south Pacific, 5400km east of New Zealand, 5600km west of Chile).
With Radeon HD 7850 and HD 7870, AMD will replace the venerable HD 6900 series which are based on the Cayman GPU. AMD Cayman featured 1536 cores in HD 6970 and 1408 cores in HD 6950, paired with 256-bit memory interface and 1GB or 2GB of GDDR5 memory.
Since Pitcairn is based on the latest “Graphics Core Next” GPU architecture, AMD did not need to cram in 1536 cores to get similar or higher results. Rather, Pitcairn will have the same number of units as Radeon HD 6950. That’s right – a fully featured Pitcairn carries 22 Compute Units, i.e. 1408 cores. There are also 24 ROPs (Raster Operation Processor) and 88 TMUs (Texture Memory Unit). Just like all GCN parts, ROP is decoupled from the memory controller.
This connects with a 256-bit memory controller and GDDR5 memory. The part about the clocks is interesting though, since AMD kept the clocks similar to the Radeon HD 7900 Series. Without further adue, these are the specs at glance:
AMD Radeon HD 7850 1GB
- $139 (Rumored)
- 20 Compute Units
- 1280 cores (Stream Processors)
- 80 Texture Units; 72.0 GTexel/s
- 24 Color ROP Units; 21.6 GPixel/s
- 1 GB GDDR5 Memory; 156.25 GB/s
- 900 MHz GPU Core
- 1250 MHz QDR GDDR5 clock (5.0 GHz “effective”)
AMD Radeon HD 7850 2GB
- $169 (Rumored)
- 20 Compute Units
- 1280 cores (Stream Processors)
- 80 Texture Units; 72.0 GTexel/s
- 24 Color ROP Units; 21.6 GPixel/s
- 2 GB GDDR5 Memory; 156.25 GB/s
- 900 MHz GPU Core
- 1250 MHz QDR GDDR5 clock (5.0 GHz “effective”)
AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB
- $199 (Verified)
- 22 Compute Units
- 1408 cores (Stream Processors)
- 88 Texture Units; 83.6 GTexel/s
- 24 Color ROP Units; 22.8 GPixel/s
- 2GB GDDR5 Memory; 171.88GB/s
- 950MHz GPU Core
- 1375 MHz QDR GDDR5 clock (5.5GHz “effective”)
The XFX Radeon HD7770 Black Edition features the Double Dissipation cooler which is a compact and smaller design of the one’s used on the higher end HD7900 Series. Two coolers blow fresh air towards an Aluminum fin block which cools the GPU Core and memory.
The card supports a 1GB GDDR5 (128-bit) memory, PCI-e Gen 3 / DX11.1 support and is powered through a single 6 pin connector. Display outputs include Dual-Mini Display Port, HDMI and DVI ports. Card would be priced around $125 when launched tomorrow.
