January 9 Launch Date for AMD Radeon HD 7900

Ladies and Gentlemen with graphics card upgrade plans, circle the date January 09, 2012, for this is going to be the day AMD will launch its next generation high-performance graphics cards in the Radeon HD 7900 series, according to reliable market sources DonanimHaber spoke with. On the 9th, AMD is expected to unveil at least two new SKUs in the HD 7900 series, most likely, HD 7970 and HD 7950. These will be based on the new 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon that will use completely redesigned number-crunching machinery, and a very wide memory bus.

AMD Radeon HD 7900 ''Tahiti'' Pictured, 384-bit Memory Bus Confirmed?

A Beyond3D forum member posted a mysterious picture of two graphics cards that could very well be engineering samples of AMD's true next-generation Radeon HD 7900 "Tahiti" graphics cards. The final products most probably won't look like these, with a bare red PCB, but it does look like the reference cooler design is ready. A more important feature in that picture is the spotting of traces for at least 11 memory chips, the 12th one (not highlighted) is apparently near the PCIe slot interface. The presence of 12 memory chips gives rumors of Tahiti featuring a 384-bit wide memory interface a shot in the arm. This will be the first AMD GPU in over 5 years to feature a memory bus wider than 256-bit. The R600 Radeon HD 2900 GPU featured a 512-bit GDDR4-capable memory interface.