Noting a mild typo: it suggests 62 compute units, when, assuming the 7990 has two full GPUs with 2048 SPs, 256 TMUs and 64 ROPs, it'd have 64 compute units enabled. (as each Tahiti core has 32)
Also, I'm even more crossing my fingers for the 7850 & 7870... The big question is, will they ALSO use GCN, or will we get saddled with VLIW4, basically making them little other than a slightly cheaper 6950/70? These benchmarks, even with preliminary drivers, are showing us just what a phenomenal leap forward GCN is providing: in terms of simple "raw" compute power, the 7970 isn't a whole huge leap above the 6970, as it only has 33% more compute units, and a ~5% bump in clock rate. In spite of the modest (~40% total) increase in raw power, and being hampered by PRELIMINARY drivers, we're seeing typically a 50-60% performance gain over the prior generation, indicating that GCN is seriously more efficient.
That, and the GPGPU benchmarks are boasting even higher improvements, suggesting that GCN fixed the double-precision failings of VLIW4, where it took 4 SPs to get enough parts for a DP FMA unit, when it wouldn't have been that hard/costly to make it take only 2 SPs. If a 7850/7870 can get this benefit, it'll partially help offset the rumored MSRPs, which ARE higher than for the prior generation.
[citation][nom]DjEaZy[/nom]http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd- [...] 70-review/http://www.techspot.com/review/481 [...] age11.html... how comes, that they haz the reviews, but TOM's talk just about leaks?[/citation]
The irony here is that these two were ALSO beaten to the punch by Tom's.... The guru3D article may have been the same day, but I recall it came up mid-day, whereas Mr. Woligrowski got the Tom's article up at midnight sharp. And the TechSpot article was 5 days late. And it appears Toms' went to painful extents to be far more complete than either... A commendable action given how scarce the info they had to go on other than having a sample card with glitchy drivers in their hand.