We finally reach the third stop in AMD's Southern Islands 28nm GPU tour which thus far saw us experiencing the power of Tahiti and Cape Verde-based Radeon cards. Now we prepare to face Pitcairn and the new Radeon HD 7870 and 7850 cards, which boast half or fewer total compute units compared to the HD 7970. Hit our review coverage of both cards to see if it means the initial Pitcairn offerings are only half as powerful as the higher-end cards.

"In total we are going to be examining two new cards, AMD's Radeon HD 7870 and 7850, both based on the GCN architecture. GCN is revolutionary in that eliminates the previous VLIW design for a non-VLIW SIMD engine. Additionally, the Pitcairn cores pack in between 16 and 20 GCN cores, 32 raster units and 128 texture units, all while boasting a transistor count of 1.4 billion in a 212mm² die. These specifications place these new products right in the middle of the Southern Islands family, and give them a good shot a competing with last gen's high-end hardware."



Link: neoseeker