AMD Radeon HD 8000M Solar System Series Detailed

Radeon HD 8000

Well, that was unexpected! AMD has fast-forwarded the launch of the Radeon HD 8000M graphics cards. I know what you are thinking, these are not desktop units (yet), but we can draw some conclusions for them from this announcement.

What we are looking at are completely “new” GPUs, these are not re-brands of refreshed chips. According to the slides we have 28nm Graphics Core Next GPUs, with multiple enhancements. The company did not reveal what is so revolutionary about them, however we can have a look at some benchmarks.

Radeon HD 8500M, Radeon HD 8600M Series

Radeon HD 8500M and Radeon HD 8600M are quite similar. Both graphics cards series would feature 384 stream processors, whereas the HD 8600M would have a slightly higher GPU clock (up to 775 MHz). Cards have the same memory speed of 1125/1000 MHz (for GDDR5 and GDDR3 respectively). These cards should perform near the desktop Radeon HD 7750’s mark, however there is no chance in out-performing it.

Radeon HD 8700M, Radeon HD 8800M Series

While the Radeon HD 8700M series would still feature 384 Stream Processors, the HD 8800M will end up with at least 640 Stream Processors. Cards from the Radeon HD 8700M Series can feature a core clock between 620-850 MHz, while the HD 8800M might have 650 to 700 MHz. AMD is also giving us some figures about computing performance of the series. The HD 8700M series could provide up to 0.6 TFLOPs of single precision computing power, whereas the the HD 8800M 0.9 TFLOPs. These numbers look impressive, but just as we compare it to desktop units, like HD 7770 which has 1.28 TFLOps of performance, we should not expect a Crysis-like gaming performance.

Radeon HD 8900M Series

The roadmap reveals that AMD is preparing three other series for the next quarter, these might be the HD 8900M, HD 88×0 and HD 86×0 series. While all three detailed here are planned for first quarter of 2013, the new ones are expected in Q2 of 2013. You can clearly see Solar in the header, which stands for Solar System. So not only do we have a confirmation of the Radeon HD 8000 Series, but also the naming for mobile units.

The ‘new’ 28 GCN Architecture

According to the source, the new 28nm architecture is the same as the current HD 7000M series. There is also information that the ‘architecture is slightly different and more efficient’, which gives us hope that these AMD cards will be a good counterpart for NVIDIA’s GeForce 700 series. Anyways, we still don’t know the exact die sizes, transistors count and total dissipated power for these GPUs.

Benchmarks provided in these slides show a comparison to the HD 7670M and GeForce 650M G5. You can clearly see how much faster these new GPUs are, but it’s hard to determine the accuracy of these graphs.

You can check these sites for more information: Perspective, PC Hardware.info

Specifications	Radeon HD 8500M	Radeon HD 8600M	Radeon HD 8700M	Radeon HD 8800M
Fabrication Process	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm
Stream Processors	384	384	384	640
GPU Clock	up to 650 MHz	up to 775 MHz	650 – 850 MHz	650 – 700 MHz
Memory	1 or 2 GB DDR3/GDDR5	1 or 2 GB DDR3/GDDR5	1 or 2 GB DDR3/GDDR5	1 or 2 GB GDDR5
Memory Clock DDR3	up to 1000 MHz	up to 1000 MHz	up to 1000 MHz	–
Memory Clock GDDR5	up to 2250 MHz	up to 2250 MHz	2000 – 2250 MHz	up to 2250 MHz
SP Computing Power	537 GFLOPs	633 GFLOPs	537-691 GFLOPs	992 GFLOPs
DP Computing Power	33 GFLOPs	39 GFLOPs	33-43 GFLOPs	62 GFLOPs
PCB	MXM	MXM	MXM	MXM
DirectX	11.1 (FL 11_1)	11.1 (FL 11_1)	11.1 (FL 11_1)	11.1 (FL 11_1)