Yesterday, the big news in the world of processors was Intel’s launch of the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture. As well as promising a 20% performance gain coupled with a 20% decrease in energy use, Intel updated the onboard GPU to HD Graphics 4000. The net result: up to a 50% increase in graphics performance.
That was yesterday though, and today AMD has come out the gate fighting with three new high-end mobile Radeon chips (the 7700M, 7800M, and 7900M) sporting new features and a significant increase in specs/performance.
At the beginning of 2012 AMD launched the 7000M series of mobile GPUs, which included the 7400M, 7500M, and 7600M chips. They offered a GPU running at up to 725MHz, with 480 processing streams, PCI Express 2.1, DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.2, OpenCL 1.1, and resolutions up to 2560 x 1600.
AMD has now surpassed what the, until now, high end 7600M offered. Of the 3 new GPU lines, the 7970M provides the best performance by increasing the clock speed to 850MHz, more than doubling the stream processors to 1,280, and adding support for PCI Express 3, DirectX 11.1, and bolting on 2GB GDDR5 memory.
The other big advantage these new 7000M series GPUs have is a change in architecture. AMD is calling it Graphics Core Next (GCN). Where as previous mobile Radeons have used a 40nm process, the new GPUs are the first to move to 28nm and a new instruction set.
AMD has also taken the opportunity to introduce AMD Enduro and AMD ZeroCore tech to the processors. ZeroCore allows the Radeon chip to consume “virtually no power” when idle, while Enduro scales the performance of the chip based on what you are doing. It can even shut the GPU down completely, which works when combined with an APU system that has integrated graphics handling everything except graphical intensive tasks such as games. To help support this there’s also AMD App Acceleration, which will offer over 200 applications that will benefit from GPU-accelertion by using the AMD App SDK.
In terms of raw performance, AMD is touting some serious gains over Nvidia’s GTX 675M mobile GPU as the table below shows:
Whether such performance claims are achievable outside of AMD won’t be known until independent testing is performed on shipping hardware. But the move to a 28nm process combined with higher clock speed, significantly more processing streams, and AMD Enduro/ZeroCore means any laptop carrying one of these new GPUs will offer high-end performance as well as extended battery life.
