Entry Level and Mainstream HD 7000 Graphics

As well as the high-end HD 7900 series GPUs which have started to roll out, there are 6 other known HD 7000 GPU series that have been reported on recently. The HD 6300/6400/6500 are all budget, entry level products. The HD 7600 series will be mid-range entry level cards, with HD 7700 offering slightly higher performance, and then the mainstream cards that are expected to be the most popular will be the HD7800 series. It is currently believed that only the Tahiti-based cards that will use the new GCN architecture, with other cards believed to be built using VLIW-4 technology.

At the higher, mainstream end of the range are the HD 7800 series chips. These will be built using TSMCs 28nm technology, but the rumor is that it will use the older VLIW4 architecture previously used by the HD 6900 family GPUs. A report at Donanimhaber suggests that HD 7870 will cost around $299, and HD 7850 will be around $199.

Next in line is the HD 7700 series. The only GPU I know of in this series is the HD 7770, although the user at Chiphell who provided details for the HD 7770 suggests that there will be an HD 7750. HD 7770 is believed to use VLIW-4 architecture and is built on a 28nm technology. It has up to 2 GB GDDR5 clocked to 1125 MHz, and a core clock of 1000 MHz. It is rumored to have 896 stream processors, 56 texture units and 16 ROPs, and a 128-bit memory interface. It is currently rumored that it will be released in February at a price of about $150.

Next, we have the entry level cards, the HD 7600 series. Once again, very little information is known, but there is a product page at AMD with full specs of the HD 7670. The specs are identical to HD 6670, meaning it is just a rebrand of an existing product. It is likely that it is also built on a 40nm process, as nothing in the specs has changed from the older model. It is expected to cost around $179, with a cheaper model, HD 7650 costing $119. HD 7670 looks to be an OEM only product.

	AMD Radeon HD 7670	AMD Radeon HD 6670
Stream Processors	480	480
Texture Units	24	24
ROPs	8	8
Core Clock	800 MHz	800 MHz
Memory Clock	1 GHz (4 GHz data rate) GDDR5	1 GHz (4 GHz data rate) GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	128-bit	128-bit
VRAM	512 MB/1 GB	1 GB
Architecture	VLIW-5	VLIW-5
Single Precision FP Performance	768 GFLOPS	768 GFLOPS

The HD 7350 has double the number of texture units of the HD 6350, as well as double the stream processors. With GDDR5 added to the mix, this could lead to a doubling of performance from the older model. In contrast to this, the HD 7450/7470 and HD 7570 all appear to be rebrands of their HD6000 counterparts. Prices are not known for these models.