Earlier this year rumored specifications for AMD’s upcoming HD 8000-series graphics cards leaked to the Internet. Details on the 8800 and 8900 series cards have since been revealed along with rumored/estimated clock speeds and pricing. One card that has, until now, remained an unknown is the dual-GPU Radeon HD 8990, however.

AMD Radeon HD 8990 Rumored for 2013 Launch - Graphics Cards 2

The existence of a dual GPU Sea Islands card has been especially suspect as a result of the ever-elusive Radeon 7990 and its almost-certain cancellation in an official AMD-branded form. On the other hand, a road map leaked by BitDreams.se and discovered by Maximum PC seems to suggest that an HD 8990 is at least being considered.

The Radeon HD 8990 follows the dual GPU traditions of its predecessors by combining two 8970 GPUs onto a single PCB. That means, if the previously leaked 8970 specifications hold true, the 8990 graphics card will have 5,120 stream processors, 320 texture units, 96 ROPs, and a 384-bit memory bus for each GPU. The card will have between 6 and 12GB of GDDR5 memory (3GB-6GB per GPU). The dual GPU card will have a maximum TDP of 375W and will come with slightly lower GPU core and memory clockspeeds compared to two individual 8970 cards. The GPU will be clocked at 950MHz and the memory will be clocked at 1250MHz. The single GPU Radeon 8970 will come clocked at 1050MHz core and 1500MHz memory, however.

  Radeon HD 7870 Radeon HD 8870 Radeon 7950 Radeon 8950 Radeon HD 7970 Radeon HD 8970 Radeon HD 7990 Radeon HD 8990
Die Size 212mm^2 270mm^2 365mm^2 ~400mm^2 365mm^2 ~ 400mm^2  365mm^2 x2 ~400mm^2 x2
Shader Count 1280 1792 1792 2304 2048 2560 4096 5120
TMUs 80 112 112 144 128 160 128 x 2 160 x 2
ROPs 32 32 32 32 32 48 32 x 2 48 x 2
Memory Interface 256-bit 256-bit 384-bit 384-bit 384-bit 384-bit 384-bit x2 384-bit x 2
Bandwidth 153.6 GB/s 192 GB/s 240 GB/s 322 GB/s 288 GB/s 322 GB/s 288 GB/s x 2 600 GB/s (total)

The dual gpu 8990 card, as well as the rest of the 8000 series will support DirectX 11, Shader Model 5.0, and OpenGL 4.2. Bit Dreams lists the maximum single and double precision performance at 10.2 and 3 TFLOPS respectively, making this a rather powerful card that is not quite the same performance as two 8970s but will take up less space. Interestingly, the card would be noticeably faster than AMD’s FirePro S10000 card (essentially two 7950 gpus) at 1.48 TF double precision and 5.91 TF single precision. That would suggest that Venus is much more efficient than Tahiti, if the numbers turn out to be true.

The card will allegedly be released sometime in the second quarter of 2013 (Q2’13). Pricing is likely to be around $1,000 but so far pricing information has not leaked. Even taking these numbers with a spoon of salt, a dual GPU 8000 series card is sure to be welcome by enthusiasts. Here’s hoping it ends up being released (unlike the 7990) and is as fast as it’s rumored to be!