Venus, Mars, Oland: AMD's Radeon 8000 Graphics Series

The folks at 3Dcenter.org may have stumbled upon a vein of gold while snooping through the files that make up the latest beta drivers from Advanced Micro Devices.

AMD may have said that it would stop the monthly updates to its WHQL-certified Catalyst drivers for graphics cards, but that doesn't mean it will completely stop. As such, there will still be occasions when hidden information will be found among the files contained in the installer packages. Case in point, the latest beta drivers make reference to sixteen device IDs, and their codenames, that were not seen anywhere else up to this point. Sure, we knew what some of the future-generation products from the Sunnyvale, California-based company would be called, but we recognize only some of the names in the list below.

Before we say anything more, we may as well provide it in full. The list is as follows.

AMD1305.1 = "KAVERI1 DESKTOP (1305)"

AMD1304.1 = "KAVERI1 MOBILE (1304)"

AMD1307.1 = "KAVERI2 DESKTOP (1307)"

AMD1306.1 = "KAVERI2 MOBILE (1306)"

AMD9833.1 = "KB 12W 2C (9833)"

AMD9834.1 = "2C 5W KB (9834)"

AMD9831.1 = "KB 4C 17W (9831)"

AMD9832.1 = "KB 17W 4C (N-1) (9832)"

AMD9830.1 = "KB 4C 25W (9830)"

AMD6600.1 = "MARS (6600)"

AMD6601.1 = "MARS (6601)"

AMD6602.1 = "MARS (6602)"

AMD6602.1 = "MARS (6603)"

AMD6602.1 = "MARS (6606)"

AMD6602.1 = "MARS (6607)"

AMD6600.1 = "MARS (6620)"

AMD6601.1 = "MARS (6621)"

AMD6602.1 = "MARS (6623)"

AMD6610.1 = "OLAND (6610)"

AMD6611.1 = "OLAND (6611)"

AMD6631.1 = "OLAND (6631)"

AMD682B.1 = "VENUS LE"

AMD6823.4 = "VENUS PRO"

AMD6821.1 = "VENUS XT"

AMD6820.2 = "VENUS XTX"

Kaveri and KB (Kabini no doubt) are the only codenames we have previously encountered, as part of AMD's 2013 APU roadmap (APU stands for Accelerated Processing Unit). KB will succeed Brazos 2.0 and will reduce the power requirements from 17W to 12W (9W in low power mode become 5W). That would imply that the four Venus, the three Oland and the nine Mars codenames would denote the Radeon HD 8000 GPU series.

Mars look like the cores of the low-end segment, while Oland covers the mainstream front, and Venus, with the LE, Pro, XTX and XTX suffixes, quite clearly fits in the high-end layer of the video card market. We'll keep an eye open for performance or availability rumors, even if we don't expect them to surface too fast. On a related note, AMD might want to launch the HD 7990 / 7970 X2 faster or risk it becoming outdated too quickly in the eyes of the people. It wouldn't do to work so many months on it only for the 8000 collection to arrive immediately afterwards. Thanks to Shashwat for sending this in!

Posted in: Hardware, Preview