Cape Verde is the direct replacement to Juniper - first sold as Radeon
HD 5770 and then rebranded to HD 6770. AMD will finally give its
mainstream performance class products an performance upgrade for the
first time in over 2 years.
The Radeon HD 7770 reference design inherits its overall design cues
from the HD 7970. The standard cooling design for AMD GPUs in this range
- blower fan at one end - has been replaced by a large diameter fan
pushing air down vertically. This design is very similar to the one
first introduced with GeForce GTX 460. The length of HD 7770 is also
similar to the GTX 460 - and by extension HD 5770/6770 - around 8.25".

HD 7770 features 3 display outputs - DVI, HDMI and miniDisplayPort. Like
Juniper XT, it is requires a single 6-pin PCI-e connector, with a power
consumption somewhere in the early-100s Watts. A single Crossfire
connector enables multi-GPU with a maximum of 2 GPUs. The reference PCB
features 4 memory chips - which indicates a 128-bit memory interface, as
in HD 5700/6700. Of course, we can expect the GDDR5 memory to run at a
higher frequency.
Finally, the Cape Verde die itself is relatively small for this segment. While Juniper XT weighs in at 166 mm2 and GF116 at 230 mm2, Cape Verde at first glance appears to be well under 150 mm2.
Cape Verde is expected to be the cheapest GCN based product. Everything
below HD 7700 series - from HD 7600 and down - is expected to be
rebrands with minor tweaks from HD 6000 series featuring the VLIW-5
architecture.
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