Here’s a quick quote from the press-release. It’s a paper launch as usual, expect the samples to be available between January the 9th and 21st

In November 2009, we unleashed the world’s fastest graphics card and then followed that up by launching the AMD Radeon™ HD 6990, taking the crown from…ourselves. Fast forward to today and we’ve outdone ourselves yet again. Refusing to settle on having the fastest graphics card, period, we also wanted to title of the fastest single GPU graphics card, bar none. After all, it is important to have goals. Today, we unveiled to the world a new player in the graphics card market – the AMD Radeon™ HD 7970, the fastest single- GPU graphics card on the planet.
 
The AMD Radeon HD 7970 represents a fundamental evolution in the graphics industry, being the first and only GPU based on 28nm process technology. With the introduction of our Graphics Core Next Architecture(GCN), the AMD Radeon HD 7970 allows gamers to experience unprecedented game performance. To take advantage of upcoming game titles and leverage the capabilities of our new GCN Architecture, we brought the AMD Radeon HD 7970 to market with full support for PCI Express 3.0, offering world-class performance scaling to our enthusiast community running the latest platforms. But we didn’t stop there.
 
Continuing to lead in multi-display technology has always been important to our customers and subsequently, important to us. Bearing this in mind, we’ve worked tirelessly to improve multi-display support with every product launch and AMD Catalyst™ driver release. With the launch of the AMD Radeon HD 7970, we bringAMD Eyefinity 2.0 technology to our customers with support for stereo 3D, universal bezel compensation, brand new display configurations and an expanded and more immersive field of view. Customers with 2560×1600 monitors in an AMD Eyefinity 5×1 landscape configuration can now achieve a surface resolution of 12,800 x 8000, driving more than 20 million pixels of screen real estate!
 
We’re plugged in and are in constant communication with our enthusiast community and industry pros and some feedback we received involved power management. For example, gamers asked for enhanced power management features for their graphics card. We answered, and introduced AMD PowerTune technology in the AMD Radeon™ HD 6900 series. With the AMD Radeon HD 7970, we refined AMD PowerTune technologyand introduced enhanced power containment. This automatically adjusts GPU power draw by dynamically controlling clock speeds, allowing gamers advanced performance inside of the power envelope they specify. But we didn’t stop there. We then took power management one step further and developed ZeroCore Power technology and brought it to the AMD Radeon HD 7970. AMD ZeroCore Power technology is a sophisticated power management solution that allows our GPUs to idle at roughlu 1/20^th the power draw of previous generation products.
 
All of the above would be incomplete without our Accelerated Parallel Processing (App) technology. On the AMD Radeon HD 7970, enthusiasts will enjoy improved GPGPU performance, enhanced video quality features through the AMD HD Media Accelerator allowing users to upscale the hottest Blu-ray movies, online video and other HD content beyond 1080p resolution. With full 3D stereoscopic decode, the AMD Radeon HD 7970 supports the latest 3D movies.
 
Bringing the world’s fastest single-GPU graphics card to desktop PCs everywhere is no easy feat. It’s a culmination of many months, even years, of learning, planning and testing, involving multiple teams in locations across the globe. The launch of the AMD Radeon HD 7970 shows that once again, we are aggressively advancing the state of the graphics hardware industry – this time with the arrival of the world’s first 28nm GPU. The AMD Radeon HD 7970 is now the world’s most advanced graphics card. Simply put: we never settle.

and here are some quick specs:

• Up to 925MHz Engine Clock
• 3GB GDDR5 Memory
• 1375MHz Memory Clock (5.5Gbps GDDR5)
• 264GB/s memory bandwidth (maximum)
• 3.79 TFLOPs Single Precision compute power
• 947 GFLOPs Double Precision compute power
• GCN Architecture
  • 32 compute units (2048 Stream Processors)
  • 128 Texture Units
  • 128 Z/Stencil ROP Units
  • 32 Color ROP Units
  • Dual Geometry Engines
  • Dual Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACE)
• PCI Express 3.0 x16 bus interface
• DirectX® 11-capable graphics
  • 9th generation programmable hardware tessellation units
  • Shader Model 5.0
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Accelerated multi-threading
  • HDR texture compression
  • Order-independent transparency
• OpenGL 4.2 support
  • Partially Resident Textures (PRT)
    • Ultra-high resolution texture streaming
• Image quality enhancement technology
  • Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes
  • Adaptive anti-aliasing
  • Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA)
  • DirectX® 10/11 Super-Sample Anti-Aliasing (SSAA)
  • 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
  • 128-bit floating point HDR rendering
• AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology¹
  • Up to 6 displays supported with DisplayPort 1.2 Multi-Stream Transport
  • Independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
  • Display grouping
    • Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display
• AMD App Acceleration²
  • OpenCL 1.2 Support
  • Microsoft C++ AMP
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Double Precision Floating Point
  • AMD HD Media Accelerator
    • Universal Video Decoder (UVD)
      • H.264
      • VC-1
      • MPEG-2 (SD & HD)
      • MVC (Blu-ray 3D)
      • MPEG-4 Part 2 (DivX/Xvid)
      • Adobe Flash
      • DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
    • Enhanced Video Quality features
      • Advanced post-processing and scaling
        • Deblocking
        • Denoising
        • Automatic deinterlacing
        • Mosquito noise reduction
        • Edge enhancement
        • 3:2 pulldown detection
      • Advanced video color correction
        • Brighter whites processing (Blue Stretch)
        • Independent video gamma control
        • Flesh tone correction
        • Color vibrance control
        • Dynamic contrast
        • Dynamic video range control
• AMD HD3D technology⁴
  • Stereoscopic 3D display/glasses support
  • Blu-ray 3D support
  • Stereoscopic 3D gaming
  • 3rd party Stereoscopic 3D middleware software support
• AMD CrossFire™ multi-GPU technology⁵
  • Dual, triple or quad-GPU scaling
• Cutting-edge integrated display support
  • DisplayPort 1.2
    • Max resolution: 4096×2160 per display
    • Multi-Stream Transport
    • 21.6 Gbps bandwidth
    • High bit-rate audio
    • Quad HD/4k video support
  • 3GHz HDMI 1.4a with Stereoscopic 3D Frame Packing Format, Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio
    • Max resolution: 4096×3112
    • 1080p60 Stereoscopic 3D
    • Quad HD/4k video support
  • Dual-link DVI with HDCP
    • Max resolution: 2560×1600
  • VGA
    • Max resolution: 2048×1536
• Integrated HD audio controller
  • Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
  • Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
• AMD PowerPlay™ power management technology³
  • Automatic power management with low power idle states
• AMD PowerTune technology³
  • Intelligent TDP management technology
  • Dynamic clockspeed/performance enhancement for games
• AMD ZeroCore Power³
  • Ultra-low idle power when the system’s display is off
  • Secondary GPUs in an AMD CrossFire™ configuration power down when unneeded
• AMD Catalyst™ graphics and HD video configuration software
  • Software support for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP
  • AMD Catalyst™ Control Center – AMD Catalyst™ software application and user interface for setup, configuration, and accessing features of AMD Radeon products
  • Unified Graphics display driver – AMD Catalyst™ software enabling other PC programs and devices to use advanced graphics, video, and features of AMD Radeon™ products

The first reviews of the Radeon HD 7970 can be read here:
Anandtech
HotHardware
PC Perspective