Latest AMD GPU - Amd HD 8000 'Sea Islands' Specs and Review

AMD's Southern Islands GPU line-up was completed 6 months ago with the launch of the Pitcairn based Radeon HD 7800 series graphics cards. Now with Nvidia launching GTX 650 and GTX 660, it was high time that AMD came back with something powerful. Last week, spec sheets on AMD’s Radeon HD 8000 series leaked out to the press. The chart shows the two upcoming graphics cards that would theoretically replace AMD’s HD 7870 and 7850. With leaks like this, there’s always the question of whether or not the data is valid. But One thing is sure AMD is indeed coming up with powerful GPU's and its tiem you take a look at what these devices are capable of(supposedly!)

ATI Radeon 8000 Series

According to various leaked sources and combining commom factors between them, It can be inferred that Sea Islands GPUs will use the Second Generation Graphics Core Next (GCN2) architecture, and will be built on the same 28 nm process. Comparing Oland based GPUs with their Pitcairn counterparts, we see a performance improvement of between 54% and 75%. The performance of Radeon HD 8870 is comparable to GeForce GTX 680, 30% faster than the GTX 660 Ti.These improvements align nearly perfectly with what we’d expect a next-gen architecture to deliver in the same price bracket. Memory bandwidth bumps upwards thanks to the use of faster GDDR5 RAM, pixel fillrates are up slightly, texture fillrates improve significantly. So, A Powerful device by AMD! Here is complete Specs Compiled from three different sources

	Radeon HD 7870	Radeon HD 8870	Difference
GPU	Pitcairn XT	Oland XT
Transistors	2.8 billion	3.4 billion	+21%
Die Size	212 mm2	~275 mm2	+30%
Base Clock	1000 MHz	1050 MHz	+5%
Boost Clock		1100 MHz
Computing Performance SP	2.25 TFLOPS	3.94 TFLOPS	+75%
Computing Performance DP	160 GFLOPS	246 GFLOPS	+54%
Texture Units	80	112	+40%
Texture Fillrate	80 GT/s	123.2 GT/s	+65%
ROPs	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	32 GP/s	35.2 GP/s	+10%
Memory Bandwidth	153.6 GB/s	192 GB/s	+25%
TDP	175W	160W	-9%
MSRP	$349	$279	-20%

Radeon HD 8850 had TDP of 130W, identical to HD 7850, and costs 25% less. All this adds up to a very favorable performance/power/$ ratio improvement: Radeon HD 7850 Radeon HD 8850 Difference GPU Pitcairn Pro Oland Pro Transistors 2.8 billion 3.4 billion +21% Die Size 212 mm2 ~275 mm2 +30% Base Clock 860 MHz 925 MHz +7% Boost Clock 975 MHz Computing Performance SP 1.76 TFLOPS 2.99 TFLOPS +70% Computing Performance DP 110 GFLOPS 187.2 GFLOPS +70% Texture Units 64 96 +70% Texture Fillrate 55 GT/s 93.6 GT/s +70% ROPs 32 32 Pixel Fillrate 27.5 GT/s 31.2 GP/s +13% Memory Bandwidth 153.6 GB/s 192 GB/s +25% TDP 130W 130W 0% MSRP $249 $199 -25%
Just because the Radeon 8870 is specced like a 7950 doesn’t mean it’ll perform like one. AMD will have tweaked the architecture to improve performance and power efficiency; the lower TDP is proof enough of that. This data suggests that AMD is pursuing an evolutionary strategy with the HD 8K GPU.GCN remains an excellent architecture, and AMD has enough on its plate trying to deal with bringing new SoCs to market — the company may have chosen a single GPU strategy to divert engineering resources where they’re needed most.