AMD's Radeon HD 7970 graphics processor

Oh, man. Just a few days before Christmas, AMD uncorked a massive jug of holiday cheer in the form of the Radeon HD 7970 graphics card. Sloshing around inside? The world's first GPU produced on an 28-nm manufacturing process. This incredibly fine new production process has allowed AMD to cram more transistors—and thus more graphics horsepower of virtually every sort—into this puppy than any graphics chip to come before. While many kids were looking forward to the latest Xbox 360 game under the tree on Christmas morning, the Radeon HD 7970 delivers nearly fifteen times the texel filtering speed of Microsoft's venerable game console, to name one key graphics rate. I don't want to dwell on it, but this new Radeon is nearly an order of magnitude powerful than an Xbox 360 in nearly every respect that matters.