Earlier this month we informed about leaked codenames of upcoming Radeon HD 8000 Series found in Catalyst drivers. Story goes further, since the newest drivers add even more interesting information.

Apparently, we were right, that VENUS LE and VENUS PRO, might be the GPU codenames for Radeon HD 8800 series. Take a look at previous article first. Now notice that the naming scheme for AMD682x corresponds to VENUS chips.

AMD682B.1 = “VENUS LE” -> Radeon HD 8850
AMD6823.4 = “VENUS PRO” -> Radeon HD 8870

And here is the newest listing from the 9.00-120512a driver.

So it looks like AMD682x fits to Radeon HD 8800 Series after all. Only now, we have a confirmation. Company is simultaneously preparing their Desktop and Mobile GPUs, which will almost certainly, have HD 8000 naming.

It is worth mentioning, that NVIDIA has already had their GeForce 8800 series in 2007, which were very popular due to noticeably higher performance than their predecessors. On the other hand, AMD has also released one card with 8800 naming, although it is a 11-year old FireGL graphics card and uses AGP 4x interface.

The newest driver also reveals that the company is preparing a new FirePro A300 graphics cards. The only part I don’t really understand is why they are still calling them ATI.

Few days ago AMD has released their newest Tahiti XT2 chip, six months after Radeon HD 7970 was officially announced. Although it’s hard to guess what is company planning, we might be expecting upcoming Radeon HD 8000 series, which would also be based on 28nm process, later this year.