Radeon HD 7000 series
The Radeon HD 7000 series, codenamed "Southern Islands", is a family of GPUs developed by AMD, and manufactured on TSMC's 28 nm process. 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. Architecture. Graphics Core Next was introduced with the Radeon HD 7000 Series. Multi-monitor support. 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 . Video acceleration. 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. OpenCL (API). OpenCL accelerates many scientific Software Packages against CPU up to factor 10 or 100 and more. Open CL 1.0 to 1.2 are supported for all Chips with Terascale and GCN Architecture. OpenCL 2.0 is supported with GCN 2nd Gen. or 1.2 and higher) For OpenCL 2.1 and 2.2 only Driver Updates are necessary with OpenCL 2.0 conformant Cards. Vulkan (API). Vulkan 1.1  is supported for all with GCN Architecture with recent drivers on Linux and Windows. Vulkan 1.2 is available for GCN 2nd Gen or higher with Windows Adrenalin 20.1(and newer) and Linux Mesa 20.0(and newer). Desktop products. The 28 nm product line is divided in three dies ("Tahiti", "Pitcairn", and "Cape Verde"), each one highly increasing shader units (32, 20 and 10 respectively). While this gives a high increase in 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. Radeon HD 7900. Codenamed "Tahiti", the Radeon HD 7900 series was announced on December 22, 2011. Products include the Radeon 7970 GHz Edition, Radeon HD 7970 and Radeon HD 7950. The Radeon HD 7970 features 2048 usable stream cores, whereas the Radeon HD 7950 has 1792 usable stream cores, as  256 out of the 2048 cores are disabled during product binning which detects defective areas of a chip. The cards are the first products to take advantage of AMD's new "Graphics Core Next" compute architecture. Both cards are equipped with 3 GB GDDR5 memory and manufactured on TSMC's 28 nm process. The "Tahiti" GPU is also used in the Radeon HD 7870 XT, released November 19, 2012. In this case one quarter of the stream processors are disabled, giving 1536 usable cores. Additionally, the memory interface is downgraded from 384-bit to 256-bit, along with a memory  size reduction from 3 GB to 2 GB. Radeon HD 7800. Codenamed "Pitcairn", the Radeon HD 7800 series was formally unveiled on March 5, 2012, with retail availability from March 19, 2012. Products include the Radeon HD 7870 and Radeon HD 7850. The Radeon HD 7870 features 1280 usable stream cores, whereas the Radeon HD 7850 has 1024 usable stream cores. Both cards are equipped with 2GB GDDR5 memory (some 7850s offer 1GB) and manufactured on TSMC's 28 nm process. Radeon HD 7700. Codenamed "Cape Verde", the Radeon HD 7700 series was released on February 15, 2012 . Products include the Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition and Radeon HD 7750. The Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition features 640 stream cores based on the GCN architecture, whereas the Radeon HD 7750 has only 512 usable stream cores. Both cards are equipped with 1 GB GDDR5 memory and manufactured in 28 nm. On March 22, 2013, another card, Radeon HD 7790, was introduced in this series. This card is based on the Bonaire architecture, which features 896 stream cores using 2nd Generation GCN technology, an incremental update. In May 2013, AMD launched the Radeon HD 7730, based on the Cape  Verde LE graphics processor. It features a 128-bit memory bus, 384 stream cores, 8 ROPs, and a core clock speed of up to 800 MHz. The HD 7730 came with GDDR5 and DDR3 variants, running on memory clock speeds of 1125 MHz and 900 MHz, respectively. Load power usage was lowered by 14.5% (47W) compared to the Radeon HD 7750 (55W). Graphics device drivers. AMD's proprietary graphics device driver "Catalyst". AMD Catalyst is being developed for Microsoft Windows and Linux. As of July 2014, other operating systems are not officially supported. This may be different for the AMD  FirePro brand, which is based on identical hardware but features OpenGL-certified graphics device drivers. AMD Catalyst supports all features advertised for the Radeon brand. Free and open-source graphics device driver "Radeon". The free and open-source drivers are primarily developed on Linux and for Linux, but have been ported to other operating systems as well. Each driver is composed out of five parts: The free and open-source "Radeon" graphics driver supports most of the features implemented into the Radeon line of GPUs. The free and open-source "Radeon" graphics device drivers are not reverse engineered, but based  on documentation released by AMD.