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Code names for AMD Radeon HD 8000 series found in drivers

Final8y

Final8y

Final8y

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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
 
AMD have their work cut out to introduce a card that performes better given thier limited to 28nm, Nvidia have faster cards that are smaller and a lot less power hungry.
 
Freddie1980 said:
AMD have their work cut out to introduce a card that performes better given thier limited to 28nm, Nvidia have faster cards that are smaller and a lot less power hungry.
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Not for most of the AMD range though. The other 28NM cards outside of Tahiti don't appear to have an issue and these are the volume cards and seem to not be less energy efficient. Tahiti has much higher DP abilities than the GK104 which is smaller as a result and consumes less power. I updated the Kepler thread here for ages,and it was obvious that Nvidia had done this early on. The other GPUs of the AMD 28NM range do not have the handicap of Tahiti,so are much more efficient regarding die size and power consumption for gaming. Even the HD7870 is close to an HD7950 and it uses a GPU which is 72% smaller. So Tahiti cannot be the yardstick for all the AMD HD7000 range. Neither can it be the yardstick for the HD8000 series too.

An example on the Nvidia side is the GK107(118MM2). Even with GDDR5 it probably won't beat Cape Verde(123MM2) which is found in the HD7770,let alone an HD7750 which is a salvage part. The mobile GT640 with GDDR5 seems to be not massively faster than the mobile GT640 with DDR3 either,despite the former have a higher clockspeed too.
 
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the 7970 "tahiti 2" has been confirmed to be nothing more than better binned tahiti 1 chips. but they do release next week, and 'm guessing at current tahiti 1 prices, so not much to complain about
 
PorkPieCat said:
the 7970 "tahiti 2" has been confirmed to be nothing more than better binned tahiti 1 chips. but they do release next week, and 'm guessing at current tahiti 1 prices, so not much to complain about
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Except both the AMD and Nvidia cards are still overpriced/too expensive for what they are.

7970 V2/GTX680 should be at £330-£400 max
7950/GTX670 should be at £220-£260
7850 should be at £150-£160

7870 is just a pointless card to for the sake of pushing up the prices of the cards above it. Its price point is where the 7950 should be at.
 
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Freddie1980 said:
AMD have their work cut out to introduce a card that performes better given thier limited to 28nm, Nvidia have faster cards that are smaller and a lot less power hungry.
Click to expand...

The 7870/7770 are noticeably more efficient both on power AND per mm^2 compared to the 680gtx. The 7970 uses more power, is often faster, and has a huge amount of DP power that is essentially wasted power for gaming but uses power and is in there, the 680gtx simply doesn't have it. Also the 7970 was built for a new 28nm process and had significant(rumoured to be 15% or a bit more) space dedicated to increased yields.

Even on 28nm they can afford to move up to 400mm and they can claw back a decent portion of space as 28nm yields are better leaving it possible to be far far more space efficient.


What they do, who knows, for gaming(all I'm interested in as well in terms of buying, tech wise I'm interested and impressed by the 7970) AMD would do better to make a dedicated gaming card at a similar size 350-400mm2 without the DP, and a bigger card for the professional market with the DP(because that market will pay through the teeth for cards anyway), I hope they do but not too sure they will.

A 7870 that was 300mm2 instead of vastly smaller with significantly more shaders would offer gamers a much better value card than the 7970, opportunity missed there.

Really not sure what the fuss is with the 7990, for guys who go quadfire, honestly I can't see the problem with the cost of a stupid setup on the 7970 launch, and noise wise I'd go watercooling either with 2x7990's or 4x7970's, better overclocking, available ages ago. The OLD dual cards were great, vastly better value per core, 3870x2 and particularly the 4870x2 were fantastic and available soon after the single gpu making it worthwhile, everything since then has been pointless, badly designed, overly hot and loud and rubbish(amd and Nvidia).

If I was going sli/xfire and particularly with four cards, if I was spending that much on gpu's I'd want them they day their launched till the day the replacements are available, not spending £1600 for a quadfire setup that was superceeded a few months later.
 
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