There were some rumors at the beginning of the year that AMD would release a new series of cards, in order to refresh the 7000 series that was released more than a year ago; AMD has confirmed this but they have also added that we should expect these at the end of the year. However, we can see from time to time some surprises from them like the 7790, which is meant to fill the gap between the Radeon HD 7770 and the Radeon HD 7850, or the recently released dual GPU 7990, which has taken again the crown as being the fastest video card yet. The card we are reviewing today is also a response to the Nvidia GeForce 650Ti, which dominated this price point with quite a lot of success.

The GPU is manufactured using TSMC 28nm technology with 2080M transistors and 37 square millimeters larger than Cape Verde. Bonaire also comes with 14 CU (Compute Units) and each of these units contains 4 VU (Vector Units). Also, each VU comes with 16 SP (Stream Processors) and a single texturing unit; after we do the math, we will get a total of 896 shaders and 56 texture units.

Based on the previously released GCN Technology (Graphics Core Next), we also get some updates like a new AMD PowerTune Technology implementation. The Bonaire has now 8 states (opposed to the original 4) it can jump to at any time, depending on the current activity, the current limits or TDP: