Details regarding AMD's dual-GPU retort to NVIDIA's benchmark-busting GeForce GTX 690 have been few and far between. Following a rumoured specification for the fabled Radeon HD 7990 back in March, the card that was supposed to take its place atop of AMD's GPU food chain appears to have dropped off the radar.
Perhaps the extreme performance of NVIDIA's new champ has the red team thinking twice, but whatever the reason, we've neither seen nor heard of any HD 7990 progress in the build up to Computex. And there might be some truth to this perceived lack of development, as AMD's partners now appear to be conjuring up dual-GPU solutions of their own.
Presumably in absence of an AMD-designed HD 7990, card manufacturers are rumoured to have been granted a green light to develop customised monster solutions. According to Turkish site Donanimhaber.com, the in-house-designed dual GPU cards will be known as Radeon HD 7970 X2, which in turn hints heavily at the underlying specification. We can expect to see a pair of Tahiti GPUs on a single board alongside 6GB of GDDR5 memory (3GB per GPU).
That will give the GTX 690 challenger a massive 4,096 processor cores, 256 texture units and 64 ROPs all knitted together through on-board CrossFire. Frequencies remain the big mystery, but if add-in-board partners have hopes of beating NVIDIA, we may need to see the Tahiti cores clocked in above the reference 925MHz. A thermal challenge, but one that would explain some of the gargantuan coolers being teased ahead of next week's Computex trade show.
