AMD Radeon HD 7970 introduces 28nm GCN Architecture, Eyefinity 2

AMD today announced the AMD Radeon HD 7970. Why this is particularly interesting to the professional CAD/DCC community is because of the new SIMD-based Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architecture first detailed at the 2011 Fusion Developer Summit.  Basically GCN enables the card to act both as a a graphics workhorse and a computing (e.g. OpenCL, C++ AMP, DirectCompute) workhorse for the processing of non-3D workloads such as video rendering, photo editing, code cracking,  physics FX and scientific calculations.

The 28nm process means the new cards are faster than their 32 nanometer predecessor equivalents, without consuming significantly more power, or generating more heat (even though the number of stream processors increased from 1536 to 2048 and clock speed increased from 880MHz to 925MHz).

Also of note is Eyefinity 2.0 which adds support for stereo 3D, universal bezel compensation, brand new display configurations and an expanded and more immersive field of view. This allows users with 2560x1600 monitors in an AMD Eyefinity 5x1 landscape configuration to achieve a horizontal resolution of 12,800 pixels, driving more than 20 million pixels of screen real estate.

Take aways from my perspective:  GPGPU computing is now mainstream. High-performance with low power consumption is mainstream. 3+ display Eyefinity and stereo 3D are mainstream. And lastly, this makes me excited about the next generations of FirePro graphics cards.