According to a report by Guru3D we can expect to see AMD’s HD 9000 series this October. AMD has already released the HD 8000 series for OEMs and mobile parts and a desktop equivalent isn’t expected for the retail channel. Instead AMD will skip straight to HD 9000 in October basing the first of these new cards on the current incarnation of the 28nm process – not a downward shrink to 20nm like previously rumoured or a revised 28nm process. These existing 28nm parts will be codenamed Curacao and Hainan.
Curacoa is expected to be an upgrade of the Tahiti Silicon with 2304 stream processors based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) 2.0 architecture with 144 Texture Mapping Units, 48 Raster Operations Pipelines and a 384 bit GDDR5 memory interface. There is also an “improved front-end” which adds four asynchronous computing engines – ACEs – and three independent geometry engines. Curacao will be divided up for the highest end two – four graphics cards while Hainan will come in to replace Pitcairn in the more performance-segment. Hainan features up to 1792 GCN 2.0 cores, 112 TMUs, 32 ROPs and a 256 bit memort interface. It uses fewer ACEs and geometry engines than Curacoa.
Image courtesy of WCCFTech
Yes, I’m waiting.
Actually if it performs well, then it may bring the price of nvidia cards down by a little bit.