The next SKUs to appear in AMD's HD 7000 series lineup target the upper mid-range segment. These will be the Radeon HD 7850 (in both 1 and 2GB GDDR5 flavours) and the HD 7870, all of which are said to be on track for arrival in March.

The ‘Pitcairn' 28nm GPUs used for the HD 7800 Series while taking a bit of a hit in terms of stream processor count etc. aim to please from a price-performance perspective in the sub-$300 segment for budget minded gamers.

Looking closer at some of the specs, beginning with the HD 7870 (codenamed Pitcairn XT), it features 22 GCN CU's with 1408 stream processors, 88 texture units, 24 ROPs and core / memory frequencies of 950MHz / 1375 MHz (5500MHz effective). The card will come with 2GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit wide interface.

The HD 7850 (Pitcairn Pro) will comprise 20 GCN CU's and 1280 stream processors, 80 TMU's, 24 ROPs and run core and memory frequencies of 900 MHz and 1250 MHz (5GHz effective) on a 256-bit memory interface. As mentioned earlier, there will be both 1 and 2GB variants of this card on the market.

The source also briefly mentions a HD 7890 possibly coming about sometime a little later down the track which unlike the 7850 and 7870 will be based on the 7900 series Tahiti GPU with 1536 stream processors and 1.5GB memory on a 384-bit memory interface. This SKU has not in any way been confirmed as yet, however.

KitGuru says: While still unconfirmed, we're hearing that the HD 7850 1/2GB models will cost US $219/$249 while the HD 7870 has its price set at US $299.

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