AFOX ‘HD 7850’ Prototype Has Only 768 Shaders – Upcoming HD 7830?
Tom’s Hardware Germany has received a very odd prototype HD 7850 from AFOX and it’s not the fact that it’s a single slot card, either. When they viewed the specifications in GPU-Z, they found that the card has only 768 shaders, instead of the expected 1024 of a normal HD 7850, while everything else was the same as a HD 7850. It had lower benchmark performance too and flashing it with a HD 7850 BIOS made no difference to performance. There’s speculation that it might be an unnanounced OEM card, or a forthcoming HD 7830 or similar. Also, the Catalyst Overdrive overclocking function didn’t work on it. There’s also an update stating that it appears that this is an early engineering sample, which could be the reason for this.
Update 05/03/2012
AMD Shanghai became aware of our discovery of a Pitcairn chip with 768 shaders and made it clear that it did not want news spreading of a Radeon HD 7850 with only 768 shaders. To be clear, AFOX was just as surprised as everyone else to learn about this mystery chip. This PCB with this chip was produced at the beginning of the Radeon HD 7800-series’ production. It’s plausible that these 768 shader chips were indeed for validation due to supply considerations. Given the stir that this discovery has created, it’s safe to assume that this chip wasn’t intended to leave the engineering labs.
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