Code names for AMD Radeon HD 8000 series found in drivers

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Final8ty

Gawd
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After speculations on various problems NVIDIA made a comeback with Kepler and showed the world how it's done, but AMD is not sitting idle for now the next generation graphics cards based on the Sea Island architecture has appeared in the latest drivers.

NVIDIA took back the lead with a small margin with the launch of GeForce GTX 680 and then trumped that with the GTX 690. AMD's counter with Radeon HD 7990 with dual Tahiti circuits is still behind closed doors. There is something even more interesting than the rumored HD 7990, namely code names for graphics cards in the future HD 8000 series.

Code names with bundled model names first appeared in test drivers from AMD and revealed that the company has at least 16 new graphics cards coming - this can change at any time though. First we have the code name Venus, followed by the suffixes XTX and XT, which represent HD 8970 and HD 8950. There is also a Venus Pro LE, which implies a crippled version that will be part of a HD 8800 series. In the lower segments we see names like Oland that is used in the HD 8700 series.

Other than that we know very little about the Sea Islands family. What we do know is that it will build on the new Graphics Core Next architecture, also known as GCN. Besides better performance and energy efficiency it will focus more on GPGPU acceleration and a continued work toward Heterogenous System Architecture, HSA.

It is interesting that just Venus and Oland are mentioned, which are only two graphics cores to cover the whole upper segment. It is too early to speculate in this, but we know for certain that AMD's third generation APU Kaveri will sport eight GCN units for a total of 512 Radeon cores - like Radeon HD 7750. It is therefore likely that the new APU will run in Dual Graphics with a HD 8600 series - today's HD 7750 and HD 7770? As the integrated graphics processors grow faster, graphics cards in the lower price ranges become more and more irrelevant and thus not worth spending a lot of money on developing new ones.

We can only wait and see what will happen, but we find our scenario quite likely. Radeon HD 8000 and Sea Islands are expected to appear in H1 2013.
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http://www.nordichardware.com/news/...000-serien-synas-i-senaste-drivrutinerna.html
 
RadXge said:
H1 2013??
Why bother now???
Click to expand...

because if the codes are in the drivers then that means they already have engineer samples floating around. the rumor is some time between late october and january. saying first half 2013 just saves their asses from being wrong and being castrated on the internet :D
 
We can only wait and see what will happen, but we find our scenario quite likely. Radeon HD 8000 and Sea Islands are expected to appear in H1 2013.


Wow, that is a long delay between generations. The 7900 series was revealed by AMD back in December 2011, and now we have to wait all the way to 2013 for the next generation 8900 series ? :confused: I have been buying VideoCards since the mid 90's, typical release schedule between GPU generations was like 6 - 9 months, never 2 years :rolleyes: I was expecting the 8970 single card to come out like Oct- Dec, guess I was way off.
 
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