What, I hear you cry – the Radeon HD 9970 specs? What about the 8000 series? Well, it seems that for the desktop, the Radeon 8000 series will be skipped, and instead we’ll be moving straight on to the 9000 series, known as the Volcanic Series.
The Volcanic Island Radeon HD 9000 series should be launched this year or early next year for the Desktop market, and yes, we have do have some information on the flagship product, the HD 9970. The series as a whole will feature a 20 nm lithography and will be designed to have Gate-Last transistor.
The leaked (and unconfirmed specifications for the Radeon HD 9970 feature a rather astounding 4096 stream processors, four geometry engines, 256 TMUs, 16 serial processing units, and 64 ROPs. Memory will be a 512-bit memory bus, and unsurprisingly be GDDR5 memory. We don’t have information on to the frequency of either the core, memory clock or for that matter the power requirements for the device.
How does that compare to say the 7970 desktop unit? Well, the 32 compute units of the Radeon 7970 features 2048 Stream Processors, which gets stomped on by the Radeon HD 9970 which features double the amount. We can only guess the GFLOPS of power the card will output right now, as there isn’t any information on the clock specs.
