164 square mm chips
If you can hold your breath until February, it looks like AMD will introduce the smallest 28nm graphics chip at a very affordable price.
The Radeon HD 7770 is based on the Cape Verde XT chip and it should end up clocked at 900MHz. It has 896 stream processors as well as 56 texture units and 16 ROPs. The memory is clocked at 1375MHz (5.5GHz GDDR5 effective).
Since the card is trimmed to a 128-bit memory interface, its memory bandwidth is 88GB/s and it comes with 1GB memory. It should start selling at some point in February for $149.
The runner up is HD 7750 based on Cape Verde PRO, works at 900MHz has 832shaders, 52 TMUs and 16 ROPs. The memory works at 5.0GHz bringing the total possible bandwidth to 80 GB/s for its 1GB of memory. This one will sell for $10 less, or $139.
Of course, for more demanding users Pitcairn cards will be the preferred choice. The HD 7870 and HD 7850 feature a 256-bit memory bus, along with more shaders and higher clocks. They will sell for $299 and $249 respectively.
There are more details to follow, but we know that Pitcairn should also come in February and that the chip measures 245 square millimeters.
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