After months of waiting, a lot of wild guesswork and speculation there are finally some concrete information available regarding the much anticipated AMD 7970m mobile GPU. After Dell refreshed their current Alienware notebook line-up with new GPUs (Nvidia GT 650m for the M14x, GTX 660m/ 675m and AMD 7970m for the M17x and M18x), they now also posted some first specifications of AMD’s upcoming mobile GPU flagship, the 7970m. According to this page on the Dell site, the 7970m will feature 20 compute units (1280 stream processors) and 2GB of GDDR5 video RAM.
These specifications indicate that the card is indeed a downclocked version of the desktop HD 7870, a highly performant video card which is based on AMD’s newest architecture, GCN (Graphics Next Core) and built with the latest 28nm technology, resulting in higher performance while keeping the power draw on a reasonable level.
Dell reports 850MHz GPU core clock and 1200MHz on the memory. If this is indeed true then it is the same memory speed as on the desktop equivalent, while the core clock is 150MHz lower. So there should be enough headroom for overclocking, as long as the voltage, temperature and power draw allows it.
Looking at the HD7870 specs, the 7970m will probably feature 32 ROPs and 80 texture units, which should result in a nice performance jump compared to AMDs current mobile champion, the 6990m.
VR-zone reports the card will officially launch on the 24th, so we can expect to see first benchmarks by next week. One thing is already certain, this card is going to take the number one spot in the world of mobile GPUs for a while. Nvidias latest card, the 675m, is simply a renamed 580m, while the 7970m is the worlds first real next generation mobile high-end card. It’s going to be interesting to see what Nvidia is going to release in the coming months.
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