14 DAY TRIAL // The next set of islands that Advanced Micro Devices will release is called Pirate Islands, according to a very, very early information leak on the matter originating with the WCCFtech website.
We actually saw this coming. There was little chance that a leak on NVIDIA's Maxwell graphics processing units would come without something in AMD's camp showing up as well.
So here we are, faced with a bunch of details about the next line of graphics processing units and cards that AMD has in the pipeline.
According to WCCFTech, there will be three cards, at least to start with, and their names are Radeon R9 390X “Bermuda,” R9 380X a“Fiji,” and R9 370X “Treasure Island.”
Obviously, these will be the high-end products and will replace the Radeon R9 290X “Hawaii,” 280 “Tahiti XT” and 270X “Pitcairn,” respectively (Volcanic islands).
All the Pirate Islands will be built on the 20nm manufacturing process technology from TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).
First off, the Radeon R9 390X graphics card will be powered by a Bermuda XTX graphics processing unit with 4,224 stream processors.
That's a huge number, well beyond the 3,200 CUDA cores that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880 Maxwell is expected to possess, and that's already considered a lot.
The Bermuda TXT GPU will have 264 texture mapping units, as well as 96 ROPs. We can safely say that AMD isn't going to cut any corners here. Moreover, the chip will have a memory interface with a width of 512 bits.
The second video board, the Radeon R9 380X, is based on the Fiji XTX with 3,072 stream processors, 192 texture units and 72 ROPs. Its memory interface will be of 384 bits.
Finally, the Radeon R9 370X will have the Treasure Island XTX chip with 1,532 stream processors, 96 texture units and 48 ROPs. The memory interface will be of 256 bits.
According to the tentative roadmap included in the leak, the R9 370X will come out the soonest, in July or August of this year. The Radeon R9 390X will follow, in November or December, while the 380X will only show up in 2015.
The source, however, mentions that TSMC has been having trouble with the 20nm manufacturing process, which clashes with the roadmap somewhat because it implies that the architecture won't be ready in time for summer.
Nevertheless, AMD is unlikely to just use 28nm again, like NVIDIA did for the Maxwell GTX 750 (Ti) graphics card, especially so late in the year, which suggests that whatever the issue is, it won't delay the unveiling. UPDATE April 10, 2014: Fixed some errors in regards to the GPU codenames and processing node.