Thursday, December 8th 2011
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.
Sources:
Beyond3D Forums, VR-Zone
117 Comments on AMD Radeon HD 7900 ''Tahiti'' Pictured, 384-bit Memory Bus Confirmed?
This?
BTW, that is a huge GPU package.
Although there's just a small possibility that Tahiti will support XDR2, looking at these pictures is no way of dismissing that possibility. We'll have to wait for the products to actually launch, or any pre-release info to kill that "Tahiti-XDR2" rumor.
Especially that XDR2 controller is compatible with GDDR5.
That means, even if it is integrated in Tahiti die, memory interfaces will look identical. Even same memory packages, probably.
Cheers,
Sucks to see a red PCB, and dual 8-pin connectors though. 375W monster?What about the IOMMU that has been confirmed already? That could be used as teh "12th chip".
Shit. I was really expecting 128-bit IOMMU and 256-bit memory bus. Does GCN really need that much bandwidth? I'm so confused!!!
Good luck avoiding them.
I've been talking about iommu for much longer than nearly anyone else. This has to be the most exciting thing about GCN for me. Most don't even have a clue what it'd be used for.