First AMD Radeon 8000 Series Details Emerge
Specifications of two of AMD’s upcoming Radeon HD 8000 series, the Radeon HD 8870 and Radeon HD 8850 both using next generation “Sea Island” GPUs, has been leaked. As a replacement to Pitcairn, these graphics cards will not be the fastest Sea Island GPUs of the family, with a higher SKU coming later (possibly called the Radeon 8970). Codenamed “Oland”, these GPUs come in at approximately 280mm2 and feature 3.4 billion transistors, a large jump up from Pitcairn’s 2.8 billion.
The Radeon HD 8870 is expected to equal the GeForce GTX 680 in performance with 1,792 Unified Shaders running at a base clock-speed of 1,050 MHz and PowerTune with Boost up to 1,100 MHz. Memory bandwidth has been given a large kick all the way up to 192 GB/s, equaling that of the GeForce GTX 680 and implying a possible 1,500 MHz (6.00 GHz effective) GDDR5 memory speed on a 256-bit bus. The expected TDP of these cards is in the region of 160W, 15W lower than that of the Radeon HD 7870 it replaces.
Slightly lower down is the Radeon HD 8850 with 1,536 Unified Shaders at a base clock-speed of 925 MHz and Boost up to 975 MHz, and performance expected to equal that of the GeForce GTX 670. TDP on the 8850 is expected to be in the region of 130W – similar to the Radeon HD 7850 it replaces. Two entry level cards have also been mentioned, the Radeon HD 8490 and 8570, which will most probably be re-brands from the current HD 7000 series.
The release of these cards is expected to be very early next year, with a possibly paper-launch in January. Pricing is expected to be about 20 % lower than the current Radeon HD 7800 series. Source — VideoCardz
