AMD's 7700 Series Hopes to Conquer Budget End, Suffers From Poor Pricing

From DailyTech: Today Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) continued its rollout of 28 nm Graphics Core Next (GCN) Radeon 7000 series GPUs. It first introduced the new architecture in Tahiti. Tahiti enjoyed a soft launch in December 2011, with the Radeon HD 7970 (Tahiti XT), but only began shipping in the second week of January. At the end of January it dropped a second Tahiti GPU -- the Radeon HD 7950 (Tahiti Pro).

If you thought the $450 and $550 sticker prices for the Radeon HD 7950/7970, respectively, were too high, prepare to be less shell-shocked by the sticker on the Radeon HD 7700 series, AMD's new release, which lands today.

Codenamed Cape Verde, after the 10-island Atlantic Ocean archipelago off the coast off the northwest coast of Africa, the new Radeon HD 7750 and Radeon HD 7770 will land at around $109 USD and $159 USD, respectively. That sounds pretty good.

Whereas the 7900 series easily outmatched its predecessor on paper alone, but was far behind in price, the 7700 series is quite a different story.

On paper Radeon HD 7700 series has less processing units than its direct predecessor, the rebranded Radeon HD 6700 series. It also can't compete with the predecessor on price.

Clearly the pressure is on for GCN to dramatically outperform its predecessor architecture -- and NVIDIA -- hence warranting keeping the higher price and stripped down core count.

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