will any of these cards compete with the Titan? jw

ah okay, thanks for the info, but what your saying is Titan is based off what's in a super computer?

thanks, I will follow up, and didn't mean to get off topic!:)

Sea Islands is just a software patch and a node upgrade.
 
Oland replaces the 7400-7600 families with GCN1.1, instead of VLIW4.
Bonaire replaces the 7700 family with GCN1.1.
Hainan replaces the 7800 family with GCN1.1.
Curacao and Malta replaces the single GPU 7900 family with GCN1.1.
Aruba replaces New Zealand and uses Curacao chips.
 
Malta = Tahiti
Curacao(originally Tenefire) and Aruba(dual-GPU) = 2304/2560 chips.

Found on a french site called Nokytech, HD7790 had 896-sp and supposed to replace HD7770 with 640-sp, that is a 40% increase in core count. One can only wonder what the power level is and how much change the price will have, expected to come in April.
 
HD7770 competes with GTX650 Ti in most reviews I've seen, while an HD7790 would put it in the middle of the gap between GTX650 Ti and GTX660.  nVidia would have to respond with an 660 SE or something.

I don't know how many of you have been following all the reviews on HD7790, but the summary is this: On average HD7790 uses about the same power as HD7770, but outperforms it by at least 20%.  
 

 
This is phenomenal for one reason: "Sea Islands" is AMD's Fermi refresh, they have figured out a way to reduce power consumption and increase performance-- but for some reason aren't using this wildcard this year to push HD8000 out when they could have, that reason is elusive.
 
Meaning, if they did make an "HD8970", it would be 20% faster while maintaining around 250W draw as HD7970, instead of using upwards of 300W for the same performance increase from the "Southern Islands" architecture.  Taken the other way, imagine a HD7970 using 20% less power, around 208W-- which is much closer to GTX680 now for similar performance.
 
It does give credit to Malta though, while being called HD7990, it has a pair of Sea Islands, and thus uses way less power than the unofficial dual Tahiti cards floating around.  In fact the professional version FirePro S10000 has a draw of 375W.  The official HD7990 won't use that much power, easily less than 350W, and with higher clocks.
 
HD7790 gives us a window into what we can expect from AMD-- thus what we can expect nVidia o react to, and maybe we'll see reasonable prices again.  This is why we have to pay attention to competition, drop the brand flag-waving BS which doesn't benefit anyone if it means paying $1000 for something that could have been half as much had AMD done something about it.

7790 - Bonaire XT
7870 XT - Hainan XT <-- Powercolor dun goofed naming Hainan XT -> Tahiti LE(This is the 7890 part)
7990 - Curacao XT
7990 X2 - Malta XT

Rei867990X2...So a Quad GPU card...?

The 7x90 series are all single GPUs with the X2 or XTX moniker they are a dual GPU solution.
 
Sea Islands is basically a Vishera patch.
 
Vishera -> FMA3, AVX1.1, Architectural Tweaks(Bigger TLB, Faster Metal Interconnect, etc)
Sea Islands -> Bigger Die/Cheaper to make, More Control Units(threads), More GPGPU power.

$749.99 - $849.99 Radeon HD Malta - (Malta XT) - 3072 ALUs, 256 TMUs, 64 ROPs, 8 GB GDDR5 @ 6 GHz
$499 - $549.99 Radeon HD 7990 - (Curacao XT) - 2560 ALUs, 160 TMUs, 48 ROPs, 3 GB - 6 GB GDDR5 @ 6 GHz
Radeon HD SI
$249 - $349 Radeon HD 7890 - (Hainan XT) 1536 ALUs, 96 TMUs, 32 ROPs, 2 GB - 4 GB GDDR5 @ 6 GHz
$109 - $149 Radeon HD 7790 (Bonaire XT) 896 ALUs, 52 TMUs, 16 ROPs, 1 GB GDDR5 @ 6 GHz
 
-Final Specs-  If we are going to talk about Sea Islands this all I'm going to post^