Where is the Radeon HD 7990?

Red Hawk

Diamond Member
Jan 1, 2011
3,266
169
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Why is AMD taking so long with an official 7990? The launch of the 7000 generation of AMD cards went so smoothly at the beginning of the year except for this one MIA card. All we have is a custom, unofficial 7990 from PowerColor. This is a major oversight by AMD. Regardless of who dominates single chip performance, you can't win the dual chip GPU crown if you don't show up to the competition. :(

Is a dual Tahiti card going to end up as an unreleased phantom, much like Big Kepler?
 

Jaydip

Diamond Member
Mar 29, 2010
3,691
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81
I think they realized they can't release a cooler, quieter and less power hungry card than 690 .To achieve these goals they had to clock it quite lower which might have pushed it to the second place slot.On the whole they lost nothing as $1000 gpus are hardly great sellers.
 

Bull Dog

Golden Member
Aug 29, 2005
1,985
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The 6990 had top binned parts (low leakage) in them to get the power consumption under control. Trying to get Tahiti down to 150w doesn't seem like a viable option.
 

ViRGE

Elite Member, Moderator Emeritus
Oct 9, 1999
31,516
167
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The PowerColor 7990 is likely as official as a 7990 is ever going to get. By letting partners use the 7990 name, AMD has clearly passed on the card and is leaving it up to those partners to do their own dual GPU cards as niche products.
 

Rvenger

Elite Member <br> Super Moderator <br> Video Cards
Apr 6, 2004
6,283
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I wonder if AMD could have used a 7870 core and shot up the clocks massively to help lower the power usage. Of course the compute power would hinder but it could have relatively competitive performance if the clocks were high enough.
 

Red Hawk

Diamond Member
Jan 1, 2011
3,266
169
106
I wonder if AMD could have used a 7870 core and shot up the clocks massively to help lower the power usage. Of course the compute power would hinder but it could have relatively competitive performance if the clocks were high enough.

A dual chip GPU based on Pitcairn may actually have been workable. Two 7870s totals to 2560 stream processors which should be theoretically superior the 7970's 2048, and the 7800 series has the same geometry engine as the 7900 so geometry performance would largely be double. The benefit of 2560 stream processors over 2048 may have been too marginal to be worth developing a dual Pitcairn GPU.