3/05/2012 06:23:00 PM
dannzfay
Advanced Micro Devices has only just made the official launch of the Pitcairn-based Radeon HD 7850 and HD 7870 graphics cards and, apparently, it could be changing its future plans as well.
OBR-Hardware has posted a slide whose legitimacy is questionable, but which still discloses some interesting information.
Apparently, the successor to the Tahiti graphics processing unit will be something called Tenerife, after the largest of the Canary Islands in the Spanish offshore territory.
It will be designed on the "Enhanced Graphics CoreNext" architecture, which could be a boosted version of the GCN used in the HD 7000 series.
The specs of the graphics cards based on it are 2,304 stream processors, a memory bus of 384 bits and 3GB of GDDR5 VRAM working at 6 GHz.
The thermal design power is 250W, quite a bit lower than the 300W which NVIDIA's allegedly unbeatable Kepler is rumored to sport.
The stream processor count is quite relevant, since it more or less fits with the “actual” count that Tahiti is supposed to exhibit.
Nevertheless, “Tenerife” is still a new GPU, which gives way to two possibilities: either AMD will use it in the Radeon HD 8000 series, or it will make a high-end Radeon HD 7000 model out of it.
OBR-Hardware mentions that the dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990 has been lost in limbo (it has disappeared from the Q1 and Q2 2012 roadmaps, despite being initially expected in Q1) due to inadequate cooling.
As such, the Sunnyvale, California-based IT player may design a board with an all-new GPU (the overall performance increase is said to be of 20% over the current architecture) instead of putting unnecessary effort into a dual-chip model.
It would not be the first time a new GPU was added to an existing series, regardless of how disruptive such a maneuver is. At any rate, we will know it in either the third quarter of 2012 or the first quarter of 2013.
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