Details On AMD’s Sea Islands Radeon HD 8900 Series Begin To Surface

Information has been leaked to the web about AMD’s Sea Islands Radeon HD 8900 series, codenamed “Tenerife”. Using an enhanced GCN architecture, the new HD 8900 series will offer 1.2x better compute power compared to that of the Radeon HD 7970 (4.5 TFLOPs for HD 8900 vs 3.79 TFLOPs for the HD 7970). AMD will of course continue to use TSMC’s 28nm process for the manufacturering of the GPU. That said, much of the information currently is just speculation, but the Radeon HD 8970 is expected to push 2560 stream processors, 160 texture units, 48 ROPs and 3GB of GDDR5 memory on a 384-bit bus with a transistor count sitting at an alleged 5.1 billion. The Radeon HD 8950 will supposedly be sporting 2304 stream processors, 144 texture units and 32 ROPs. Both GPUs are expected to push 6GHz GDDR5, which paired with the 384-bit bus offers up a massive 322GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Overall AMD’s Tenerife, otherwise known as Venus, GPU that will make up the Radeon HD 8900 series looks to be a monster. That said, the only truly confirmed information so far is the fact the HD 8900 series will offer HDMI and 2x miniDP with a maximum of 6 displays, along with 3GB of GDDR5 on a 384-bit bus. So for now take the information presented with a grain of salt. With that said, AMDs next generation of graphics card are rapidly approaching with manufacturing starting in late 2012 with a launch expected in early 2013.