Southern Islands (GPU Family)
 |
|
| Release date | January 9, 2012 |
|---|---|
| Codename | Southern Islands London Trinity Sea Islands |
| Architecture |
TeraScale 2 TeraScale 3 GCN 1st gen GCN 2nd gen |
| Transistors and fabrication process |
|
| Cards | |
| Entry-level | 73xx - 76xx |
| Mid-range | 7750 7770 7790 |
| High-end | 7850 7870 7950 7970 |
| Enthusiast | 7990 |
| API support | |
| Direct3D | |
| OpenCL | OpenCL 1.2 |
| OpenGL | OpenGL 4.5 |
| Vulkan |
Vulkan 1.0 SPIR-V |
| History | |
| Predecessor | Radeon HD 6000 Series |
| Variant | Radeon HD 8000 series |
| Successor | Radeon R5/R7/R9 200 series |
The Radeon HD 7000 Series, based on "Southern Islands", is further products series in the family of Radeon GPUs developed by AMD. AMD builds Southern Islands series graphics chips based on the 28 nm manufacturing process at TSMC. The primary competitor of Southern Islands, Nvidia's GeForce 600 Series (also manufactured at TSMC), also shipped during Q1 2012, largely due to the immaturity of the 28 nm process.
This article is about all products under the Radeon HD 7000 Series brand. Graphics Core Next was introduced with the Radeon HD 7000 Series.
The AMD Eyefinity-branded on-die display controllers were introduced in September 2009 in the Radeon HD 5000 Series and have been present in all products since.
Both Unified Video Decoder (UVD) and Video Coding Engine (VCE) are present on the dies of all products and supported by AMD Catalyst and by the free and open-source graphics device driver#ATI/AMD.
The 28 nm product line is divided in three dies (Tahiti, Pitcairn, and Cape Verde), each one roughly double in shader units compared to its small brethren (32, 20, and respectively 10 GCN compute units). While this gives roughly a doubling of single-precision floating point, there is however a significant departure in double-precision compute power. Tahiti has a maximum ¼ double precision throughput relative to its single precision throughput, while the other two smaller consumer dies can only achieve a 1/16 ratio. While each bigger die has two additional memory controllers widening its bus by 128 bits, Pitcairn however has the same front-end dual tesselator units as Tahiti giving it similar performance to its larger brethren in DX11 tessellation benchmarks.
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