A little earlier this week, it was reported that AMD is working on a new Radeon HD 7800 series graphics card based on the company's 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon. According to a new report, the so-called "Tahiti LE" SKU has been brand named Radeon HD 7890. Although clock speeds, core and memory configurations are still under the wraps, the new SKU, according to the report, is being designed to be 15% faster than GeForce GTX 660 on average, while being similarly priced. AMD is gunning for the crucial X'mas shopping season, when apparently, a few cool people gift high-performance graphics cards.

The launch of AMD's Radeon 7800 series is on course for March, as AMD wants to complete the launches of the entire Radeon 7000 series before NVIDIA even has its first GPU out. Radeon HD 7800 will be designed to occupy key price points in the sub-$300 market segment, where it strikes price-performance sweetspots for gamers. Central to this series is a new 28 nm GPU, codenamed "Pitcairn", from which will be derived three SKUs: the Radeon HD 7870, Radeon HD 7850 2 GB, and Radeon HD 7850 1 GB. The specifications look like this:

Radeon HD 7850

• 20 Graphics CoreNext Compute Units, 1280 stream processors
• 80 TMUs, 24 ROPs (de-linked from the memory bus, of course)
• 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, 2 GB and 1 GB variants
• Clock speeds of 900 MHz core, 1250 MHz (5.00 GHz effective) memory

Radeon HD 7870 specifications follow.