June 8th, 2012
AMD Preparing a New Tahiti XT for Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition
According to SemiAccurate, AMD is almost ready with a new release of refreshed Tahiti GPU. Since it is still a Tahiti XT chip, it won’t bring much of improvement. We may consider this new version as a GPU that was supposed to be released back in January.
SemiAccurate managed to gather quite solid and credible information, that AMD is preparing a new iteration of their Tahiti silicon. They call it a Tahiti XT 2, or T2 if you like. New silicon is not believed to be a new milestone in engineering, it is however, a more matured chip. Actual owners of Radeon HD 7970 may feel somehow disappointed, because what they bought was indeed a very good card, but it was soon overtaken by NVIDIA’s GK104 silicon. Now things may change a bit.
What AMD is preparing, is a chip that will arrive with a new reference clock of 1075 MHz (that’s the clock confirmed by the sources, and it was confirmed by engineering sample tested by Cooln.kr too). Either way, the card we are talking about is obviously Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. Card that will feature higher overclocking potential and more stability. Surprisingly, this new chip will not feature increased power consumption, and any changes to memory chips or PCB. Needless to say, it does make things simpler for AIB partners, which in the end, will only put new chips on their boards.
So what does it mean for customers? AMD will probably release a new variant of HD 7970 with the announcement of updated prices of current 7970 cards. This would slightly change a trend on the market, since NVIDIA’s GTX 680 are not that easy to buy, and there are no problems with Radeon 7000 series availability.
Interesting part is that AMD is also preparing a refreshed version of HD 7950 as well. Tahiti Pro 2, as it’s called by the source, would give a small boost to this rather slow 800 MHz reference clock.
So is AMD planning to revive their whole lineup? Well, everything points in that direction. What is your thought on AMD reviving plans? Should the company drop the prices of current silicons or release a more efficient ones?
- READ MORE (Source): SemiAccurate
