AMD Sea Islands to begin with Solar System mobile GPU's at CES 2013

[caveman-jim]

The next generation AMD mobile GPU's are the first to launch out of the Sea Islands products, under the codename of Solar System names:

These chips would be similar to the last generation of the 7000 series of desktop cards in terms of GCN Architecture. However, these chips are not a re-brand of the HD 7000M series, but rather new chips with the latest iteration of AMD's GCN with some tweaks for more power optimization and clock speed as well as improvements for their switchable graphics Enduro technology.

It appears that Cape Verde designs implemented as Chelsea and Heathrow have been breathed upon to become Mars and Venusrespectively. This leaves the top 8900 spot open for possible Sun product based on the revamped Heathrow (derived from Pitcairn) to appear.

The 384 core count of Mars differs from the 512 of Chelsea, meaning it may go into lower power devices and platforms than previously seen - which bodes well for dual graphics and enduro.

The specifications indicate that there is not really a performance delta from the previous gen, likely an increase more in performance/watt and increased features like DirectX 11.1.

More info as we get it.

Update 12/18 - the new chips are new spins, not same chips as Heathrow and Chelsea with improvments to GCN architecture for higher efficiency and improved compute performance. The 8500M, 8600M, and 8700M are the same die, different clock speeds and memory bus width - 8500M & 8600M are 64-bit and 8700M is 128-bit. The 8800M will be a new chip with 128-bit memory interface.

AMD will not be supporting dual graphics on Trinity APU's with GCN based dGPU's, a new APU will need to be released to support that. The ASUS U38DT is already shipping with the 19W Trinity A8-4555M inside, and enduro switchable courtesy of the Radeon HD 8550M added to the 192 core 7600G graphics in the APU.

[Redeemed]

Hmm... rather curious how the DT parts will pan out. Really hope it's a better jump than we had with the 7 series.

Would love to have the 8770 match one of my 5870s for performance, and the 8970 double the performance of one 5870.

[ET]

I find this both confusing and worrying. With 8500M to 8700M having 384 stream processors, albeit with an up to 30% clock difference, I'm not sure how they will span the wide range of performance targets that's expected.

On one hand it looks like the 8600M will improve greatly on the 7400M which it's shown to replace for mainstream. On the other hand, the 8700M might fight it hard to compete with the 7500/7600M, and is an inflation of code number over them, while the 8800M should beat a 7700M. The 8500M even seem to feature anywhere but on the first slide.

All in all, a rather jumbled lineup, and I hope it will make more sense once it arrives.

[caveman-jim]

The ASUS U38DT is already shipping with the 19W Trinity A8-4555M inside, and dual graphics enduro switchable courtesy of the Radeon HD 8550M added to the 192 core 7600G graphics in the APU.

[caveman-jim]

More details - the new chips are new spins, not same chips as Heathrow and Chelsea with improvments to GCN architecture for higher efficiency and improved compute performance. The 8500M, 8600M, and 8700M are the same die, different clock speeds and memory bus width - 8500M & 8600M are 64-bit and 8700M is 128-bit. The 8800M will be a new chip with 128-bit memory interface.

AMD will not be supporting dual graphics on Trinity APU's with GCN based dGPU's, a new APU will need to be released to support that.