In about a month away from now, AMD is said to introduce a new high-performance dual-GPU video card, based on the company’s Graphics Core Next architecture, which will be dubbed the Radeon HD 7990.
A specific launch date isn’t available so far, but Donanim Haber has found out that the graphics card is scheduled to arrive this April.
Most likely, the Radeon HD 7990 will be built using two Tahiti XT graphics cores that will be linked together via CrossFireX.
If AMD goes for the Tahiti XT graphics core, this could mean that the card should feature 62 Compute Units for a total of 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units and 64 ROP units.
Each one of the two GPUs will also feature a 384-bit wide memory, bus that will be connected to 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer, delivering a whopping 6GB of VRAM on a single graphics card.
The clocks that the memory chips or the two GPUs will run at are unknown, but most probably AMD will have to go lower than the 925MHz/1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective) frequencies used for the HD 7970, in order to decrease the power consumption and the heat output of this dual-GPU monster.
The good news for AMD is that thanks to its ZeroCore technology the HD 7990 can completely shut down the secondary GPU when not in use.
So far, no details regarding pricing have been uncovered, but given the $549 (420 EUR) MSRP of the HD 7970, this dual-GPU Radeon is expected to easily surpass the $700 US barrier.
Nvidia is also said to prepare a dual-GPU graphics card of its own based on the company’s upcoming “Kepler” GK104 core, which will apparently be made available in May this year.
