First January, but now its March. It's pretty save to state that the Radeon HD 7900 series cards will be released early 2012, maybe even January. However we have not even crossed that point yet already we are seeing rumors that the dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990 would be launched in March, which would be CeBIT time.

The 7990 is based on the Tahiti GPU which would be two Radeon HD 7970 or HD 7950 cores.

The Radeon HD 7990 will most probably also use the new liquid chamber cooling solution that AMD said previously that it will be included in the HD 7970 and HD 7950 reference designs.

According to the Sunnyvale-based chip maker, this brings a series of improvements over the old vapor chamber technology, while also being easier to manufacture. Radeon HD 7900-series cards use AMD's Next Generation Core (NGC) architecture that was designed to offer improved performance and functionality in GPGPU environment.

Before coming out with the dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990, AMD will release not just the HD 7970 and HD 7950, but also a series of mid-range models manufactured using TSMC's 28nm production node.

These will feature the VLIW4 (very-long instruction word) architecture introduced with the Radeon HD 6900-series GPUs.

Nvidia's next-generation graphics cores, code-name Kepler, which are built using the same 28nm TSMC fabrication node, will also arrive in 2012 and will be officially announced in December of this year, according to a recent report.