AMD unveils Radeon HD 8970M

 

After an announcement of its Radeon HD 8000M earlier this year, AMD has finally decided to market the chip the more upscale; the Radeon HD 8970M. But as before, more than a novelty, this is a chip that has changed its name and won 50 MHz more. The graphics chips are often the scene of disappointment at the ads, especially when the period is not conducive to real innovations, like now. Blocked by 28 nm, the manufacturers keep their new architectures for later, and simply play marketing during this time. We thus have criticized the range of Radeon HD 8000M in the New Year. If they had the advantage of the household for the cheapest GPU, unifying around the GCN architecture, on top of the cart is entitled to what were already a few details. This is exactly what just happened with the HD 8970M which is presented as the new "flagship" brand when it is only a Radeon HD 7970M with a sprig of Turbo. In fact, the GPU does not change because it is again a Pitcairn with 1280 processing units. The base frequency is 850 MHz and the memory is clocked to 1200 MHz for its part, as above. In fact, the only thing that seems new is the presence of a Turbo mode to increase to 900 MHz in some cases, and thus announce 2.304 TFLOPS of computing power against 2.176 TFLOPS above. In short, nothing is really appealing; but AMD uses this opportunity to indicate that the solution would be more efficient than a GeForce GTX 680M, which does not eat bread. It will be interesting to see what they will face the GTX 780M soon to be announced ... if it is not there also a simple name change. Anyway, MSI launch partner and used it to indicate that it will market its GX70 3BE using this graphics chip and an APU A10-5750m of Richland generation. Performance will announce revised upwards compared to the previous generation (9.8% in 3DMark Fire Strike 1080p). Remains to be seen what will happen in practice.