AMD releases the first GCN card, the Radeon HD 7970

AMD has finally released the first card that uses it's new more computing-oriented GCN architecture. In a step similar to the one NVIDIA took a few years back with Fermi, AMD has decided that it needs to focus more on GPUs as a computational tool. Nowdays you can do a lot of tasks in the GPU spending only a fraction of the time that would be required in a CPU approach. You can decode and encode videos, decrypt and encrypt files, do physics simulations, ... with speeds that are hundreds of times faster that what you can achieve in a CPU.

This doesn't mean that AMD is putting games in a second place, they are still it's main concern, but before this new architecture AMD cards where almost useless for GPGPU in most of the scenarios.
The 7970 is also the first PCI-e 3.0 and DX11.1 graphics card, this doesn't mean much for the end user, but prevents the architecture from getting "obsolete" in a year or so when this technologies start making a mainstream appear in consumer hardware and software.

Right now there are a LOT of reviews of this card, if anyone is interested and has the 550$ to spare, go to this anandtech recap of it's review, with lots of external links to other review sites. For the people more interested in the technical aspects of this new architecture and an in deep analysis of the card, anandtech too has an in depth review that will cover everything you might want to know about this new card.