AMD Radeon HD 7950 for Mac unveiled


The 79xx family of graphic cards from AMD pack a punch and look to be available soon for the Mac. Readers at Tonymacx86 spotted the a Mac version of the HD 7950 this week at Cebit.

Rough translation from German language site:

The AMD partner Sapphire ended the stagnation in the App Store: With the Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition soon Apple users may also take advantage of the computing power of the GCN architecture, without impoverishing it. Apple itself offers its Mac Pro computer maximum for years with a Radeon HD 5870 or HD 5770 CrossFire.

Even though Apple's Mac Pro with fantastic graphics performance advertises: Both offered for sale in the Mac Pro Radeon HD 5870 and the HD 5770, more than three years under his belt. During the transition from Apple lets himself coming, jumps unexpectedly one Sapphire: At Cebit we saw the Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition for the first time live. The upper-class graphics card based on the original HD 7950, which uses dark brown board waived a boost function and is clocked at 800 MHz (GPU). The 3 GiByte GDDR5 memory, as well as its clock of 2,500 MHz, unchanged.


Tonymac notes that native support for the 7XXX line of Radeons have been rumored for a while. All this could be a precursor to a new Mac tower system, expected sometime this year.

The HD 7950 has 3 GB of GDDR5 memory with a memory bandwith of 250 GB/sec. A quick check of LuxMark OpenCL benchmarks, the 7950 is about 2x faster than the HD5870.

TonymacX86