AMD Friday unveiled a souped-up version of its Radeon HD 7970 GPU, the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, targeted at the gaming enthusiast and high-performance computing markets.
As its name suggests, the new Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition reaches clock speeds up to 1GHz, compared to the 925MHz clock speeds recorded for the first-generation Radeon HD 7970. The new GHz edition also boasts memory bandwidth of 288 GBps, while the traditional 7970 offers 264 GBps.
That said, the two GPUs are based on the same 28nm processor architecture and boast 3 GB of GDDR5 memory.
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Also like its predecessor, the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition is based on AMD's Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, which the chip maker referred to in the December launch of its first-generation Radeon 7970 HD as something "vastly different" than any other architecture it employs. Through the use of GCN, AMD is able to position its Radeon GPUs as being heterogeneous, meaning they take on not only the traditional graphics processing native to GPUs, but also the compute processing capabilities typically associated with CPUs.
"The point of this [Graphics Core Next architecture] was to start from the ground up and create a GPU that is perfectly suited for both computing and graphics," Devon Nekechuk, product marketing manager at AMD, told CRN when the first Radeon HD 7970 launched last year.
The new AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition also includes the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker's App Acceleration technology, which it has said speeds up game play, allows users to run multiple applications at maximum speed, and provides stutter-free video playback.
Friday's announcement marks the third time AMD has introduced a GHz Edition version of one its Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs. Radeon HD 7770 and HD 7780 GPUs also are available in this super-charged model.
AMD said the new Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition will be available as early as next week from add-in board partners Asus, Gigabyte, HIS, MSI, Sapphire, TUL and XFX, starting at $499.
This story was originally published on June 22.
