AMD May Unleash Next-Generation Radeon HD 9000-Series in October

From X-bit Labs: Advanced Micro Devices may start to reveal its next-generation graphics processing units this October, according to a rumour reported by a Chinese web-site. Moreover, since the company already sells Radeon HD 8000-series to OEMs, the firm is now expected to market its new-gen products under Radeon HD 9000 product family.

AMD is projected to release code-named Curacao and Hainan graphics processing units that will belong to GCN 2.0 family of products in Q3 2013, according to a media report. The new architecture will have a number of enhancements, but the only thing currently known is that it will come with improved front-end (4 asynchronous computing engines [ACEs], 3 geometry engines) as well as increased amount of stream processors. Both Curacao and Hainan belong to Sea Islands family of GPUs, hence they do not feature advance heterogeneous compute capabilities.

The two chips are expected to be made using 28nm process technology, which is logical, keeping in mind that AMD’s manufacturing partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will only start risk production using 20nm fabrication process in Q4 2013.

Since at present AMD sells re-badged Radeon HD 7000 products as Radeon HD 8000-series products to OEMs, it is logical for the company to utilize Radeon HD 9000 sequence for its new line of graphics cards. ATI Technologies’ original Radeon 9000-series products based on code-named R300-family graphics processing units revolutionized the market of graphics cards a decade ago and helped ATI (which now belongs to AMD) to become the producer of market leading graphics solutions.

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