Over a year ago we did a GeForce then and now article and video. In there we promised a Radeon Retrospective as well. Yes, over a year ago, I know. We had several different ideas and all of them fell through for some reason or another until now. Having secured a reference design Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition we now had a GCN 1.0 Mid Range Graphics Card on hand to compare to Radeons current mainstream card, the GCN 4.0 based RX 480. I know that the RX 580 is now but we all can agree that it's a refreshed RX 480 so what we're looking at here is non refreshed original iterations of both Radeon's first 28nm GPU and their 14nm GPU.
HD 7870 GHz and RX 480
| HD 7870 GHz Edition | RX 480 8GB | |
|---|---|---|
| GPU Name | Pitcain | Ellesmere |
| Architecture | GCN 1.0 | GCN 4.0 |
| Process Size | 28nm | 14nm |
| Die Size | 212mm² | 232mm² |
| GPU Clock | 1000MHz | 1120MHz/1266MHz boost |
| Memory Clock | 1200MHz/4800MHz Effective | 2000MHz/8000MHz Effective |
| Memory Size | 2048 MB | 8192 MB |
| Memory Type | GDDR5 | GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus | 256 bit | 256 bit |
| Stream Processors | 1280 | 2304 |
| TMUs | 80 | 144 |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 |
| Compute Units | 20 | 36 |
| Floating Point Performace | 2.56 TFLOPS | 5.83 TFLOPS |
| TDP | 175w | 150w |
