In the coming week, AMD will release its Radeon HD 7700 series, which aims to increase its competitiveness in the sub-$200 market. The latest specifications exposé reveals AMD's new design strategy: Instead of increasing components such as stream processors and ROPs, which would increase transistor counts, and unnecessarily increase power draw, AMD is counting on a lesser number of better-configured Graphics CoreNext stream processors. While the previous-generation HD 5770/6770 "Juniper" GPU featured VLIW5 stream processors, the new "Cape Verde" GPU, which will go into making up Radeon HD 7770 and 7750, will feature GCN stream processors. Apart from architectural performance improvements, AMD is counting on increased clock speeds to do the trick. The specifications are listed below.

Cape Verde Physical

• Built on TSMC 28 nm process, ~1.5 billion transistors
• 10 Graphics CoreNext Compute Units (CUs)
• 640 stream processors
• 40 TMUs, 16 ROPs
• 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface

Radeon HD 7770

• All CUs enabled, 640 stream processors
• 1 GB GDDR5 memory
• 40 TMUs, 16 ROPs
• 1000 MHz core clock-speed
• 1125 MHz (actual), 4500 MHz (effective) memory clock-speed
• 72 GB/s memory bandwidth
• 1280 GFLOP/s single-precision floating-point performance
• Typical board power: 80W

Radeon HD 7750

• 8 CUs enabled, 512 stream processors
• 1 GB GDDR5 memory
• 32 TMUs, 16 ROPs
• 800 MHz core clock-speed
• 1125 MHz (actual), 4500 MHz (effective) memory clock-speed
• 72 GB/s memory bandwidth
• 819 GFLOP/s single-precision floating-point performance
• Typical board power: 55W