AMD’s GCN architectural success has put the company well ahead Nvidia

Jul 3, 2012 00:51 GMT  ·  By

As Nvidia is readying the new GK110 Kepler-based monster GPU targeted for GPU computing, and later for top-gaming performance, AMD is preparing its new Radeon 8000 “Sea Islands” GPU family.

The top-performing member of the “Sea Islands” family is codenamed “Venus,” but we already reported on that here.

The other members of the “Sea Islands” family are rumored to be called Sun, Oland and Mars, and their internal configurations will likely be:

Sun:

Die size: 230 square millimeters; Transistor count: 3.2 billion; Stream processing units: 1536; TMUs: 96 units.; ROPs: 32 units.; Memory BUS width: 256 bits.

Oland:

Die size: 135 square millimeters or 160 square millimeters; Transistor count: 1.7 billion or 2.0 billion; Stream processing units: 768 units or 896 units; TMUs: 40 units or 48 units; ROPs: 16 units for both possible variants; Memory BUS width: 128 bits or 192 bits;

Mars:

Die size: 85 square millimeters; Transistor count: 0.9 billion; Stream processing units: 320-384 units.; TMUs: 20 or 24 units.; ROPs: 8 or 16 units.; Memory BUS width : 64-128 bits.

The new “Sea Islands” GPU will likely work at even higher frequencies compared with the current GCN chips, as the 28nm manufacturing process at TSMC has matured, and the chip designer will likely do its best to achieve lower current leakage and an overall more efficient design.