Sorry if this is old news now, but...

Last year I read about the upcoming 28nm Radeon 7000 series and thought that I would finally find something with enough of an improvement in performance/watt over my HD 4770 to be worth upgrading. Then today, since it's now Q1 2012, I thought I would have a look and see if there was any news. At first I was optimistic, because it turns out that the 7670 has already been released. But then I was disappointed because it's not what I thought it would be. In fact, 7670 ~= 6670, a 40nm part just like my 4770. Furthermore, it looks like all the low-end 7xxx cards are just rebrands of older card.

I'm left thinking wtf, AMD? The misleading rebranding was one of the reasons I decided to move away from nVidia. It looks like I'll be hanging on to my 4770 for a while longer.

OEM parts only, and OEM ask both AMD and Nvidia for markups whenever they can get them. So no telling when actual 7000-series low/mid range cards will appear and what they will look like. Maybe we'll know closer to summer. More interesting than the dire shrink itself could be the improved logical power management brought so far in the new chips(at low load), but as said nothing is certain yet of the upcoming models. There's no immediate need for new products in those segments and profits are likely slim.

There will certainly be new lower-end cards, as we know amd will have two more 28nm GCN chips apart from Tahiti (Pitcairn/Cape Verde). Neither of them are low-end but if you're looking at upgrading from a 4770 that certainly isn't low-end neither. (Pitcairn might end up somewhere slightly above Cayman performance whereas Cape Verde might be a bit below Barts but that's all speculation.) Supposedly Pitcairn (in form of HD7870/7850) should appear in February, Cape Verde in March, but both could be off a month.

It's a pity... I wanted to upgrade my 5670 with a 28nm 7670 at the beginning of Q3-2012.

The TDP for your 4770 has roughly 80w peak consumption and the new 7850 has been rated at 90w and the 7670 at 60w, if you ask me, these are pretty good numbers for those like myself who are interested in performance/watt.

Even if the cards don't turn out to be more powerful, they look set to use far less power.

I will personally be looking to upgrade my 5770 for the 7850 which is listed as using less power! Will make a great story for my site.

Source:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/amd-HD-79 ... 36423.html

You shouldn't put too much faith in these old rumors there (most of them turned out wrong, not that anyone really believed HD79xx would use XDR2 back then). Clearly the TDP is wrong there too.
Lombok/Thames should be the mobile variants of Pitcairn/CapeVerde, their naming is totally irrelevant for desktops (but certainly will have a "M" in it).
I think though there's no reason to expect Pitcairn(HD78xx) to really have lower TDP than HD68xx (Barts) just as HD79xx has very similar TDP to HD69xx.
Cape Verde (HD77xx I guess) should be around 100W I gather (again, similar to Juniper based cards) while being decently faster than HD5750/70 or any renamed versions of it...

It's hardly low end, but the 7950 is out and the Sapphire HD 7950 OE seems SPCR-worthy. It runs at 1v instead of the usual 1,1v (this is probably due to luck on Anandtech's part or cherrypicking by Sapphire) and has noise under load comparable to other cards at idle. Under Metro 2033 load noise rises only by 2.6 dB from idle, and that's with only a 31C to 62C rise in temp.

Assuming it can take temps of 80C+ without problems, it seems the high end of the 7xxx series can be very quiet when undervolted. Time for SPCR to mail Sapphire and beg for a sample?

The HardwareCanucks review shows the Sapphire 7950 OC to be pretty cool and quiet for such a high end card. Maybe manufacturers are starting to listen

edited to fix typos

The 7770 is rumored to consume about 80W. Maybe Powercolor will do another GoGreen edition with better power efficiency and without a PCIe power plug.