AMD Radeon HD 8000M now shipping, new APUs unveiled

[Jos]

AMD's Radeon HD 8000M family was officially announced last month, but with CES now underway the company has taken the chance to inform us that their latest generation mobile GPUs are now shipping in products from Asus and Samsung, with Lenovo and other OEMs joining the party soon.

AMD Radeon HD 8000M Series

This is AMD's first series of mobile graphics chips  based on the Graphics Core Next architecture. As previously reported, the new parts are built on a 28nm process and feature full Direct X 11.1 support as well as ZeroCore and Enduro to scale down power usage when possible based on graphics demand.

The lineup includes 8500M models (384 stream processors, 650/1125MHz), 8600M series models (384 stream processors, 725/1125MHz), 8700 series models (384 stream processors, 850/1125MHz) and a higher-end 8700M series which boasts 640 stream processors, 700MHz core and exclusively uses GDDR5.

Desktop rebadge frenzy: Radeon HD 8000 Series for OEMs

On the desktop side AMD also announced the availability of AMD HD 8000 series graphics cards, but these remain exclusive to OEMs for now and are essentially rebadges of the entire Radeon HD 7000 family from top to bottom. Official specs for as many as nine different graphics cards were published by AMD, including the flagship Radeon HD 8970, a rebadge of the Radeon HD 7970 Gigahertz Edition with 2,048 stream processors, a core clock of 1GHz, and 3GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6GHz on a 384-bit bus.

Upcoming APUs: Kabini, Richland, Kaveri, Temash

AMD also discussed a range of new Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) that are set to arrive later this year. The two highlights were codenamed Temash and Kabini, two products that the company is touting as its first true system-on-chip APUs, and quad-core x86 parts at that. Kabini is designed to take on Intel on the ultra-thin notebook segment, with up to 50% more compute performance than current-generation Brazos 2.0, while Temash replaces Hondo as AMD's tablet and hybrid APU with double the graphics performance.

Moreover, Richland is aimed at more traditional laptops and desktops, with a claimed performance boost of 20% to 40% over the current generation of A-Series products. AMD said that Richland APUs are already shipping to OEMs and announced that systems built around this chip will come bundled with gesture- and facial-recognition software to "expand and enhance consumers' user experiences".

Lastly, the follow up to Richland will be arriving in the second half of 2013, with the 28nm Kaveri APU boosting performance further and adding new heterogeneous systems architecture (HSA) improvements.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/51272-amd-radeon-hd-8000m-now-shipping-new-apus-unveiled.html

 

[PC nerd]

Man, they're really pumping these things out.

I swear there was a bigger gap between the 5xxx-6xxx series.

I haven't even bought a 7xxx series GPU yet and the 8xxx are here.

 

[ghasmanjr]

This is disappointing and not at all surprising. With AMD not trying with the 8970, this could end up like the AMD vs Intel processor war where Intel doesn't care because AMD bombed with bulldozer. I want the 780 to demolish the 8970, but I doubt that'll happen now. At least hurry up and release these so the 680s can drop in price lol.

 

[dividebyzero]

If Sea Islands is delayed to the second half of the year then you might see the HD 8000's as mostly* a rebrand OEM series (like the Nvidia 100 and 300 series) and Sea Islands become the HD 9000 series...or maybe the OVR 9000 series. Wouldn't surprise me to see AMD leverage ATi's history with a HD 9800 Pro/XT part.

Not sure how the HD 8350 is actually viable. The card was previously the HD 7350...the HD 6350...and the HD 5450. You'd need to have a pretty weak IGP option to make the 8350/5450 a "step up" in performance.

* The HD 8670 and HD 8570 at least seem to be Sea Islands based (Oland)

 

[oldikes]

Since its a rebadge I figure its probably better to buy a 7xxx series when the 8xxx series come out, because they will be much cheaper?

 

[dividebyzero]

If all the HD 8000's remain OEM parts it shouldn't affect HD 7000 pricing, unless the OEM parts start finding their way into retail- as sometimes happens.
AMD could also slot in a HD 7000 refresh into the 8000 series numbering (similar to the HD 4870 / 4890 convention), with an HD 8980 -or even 8990 if AMD aren't using the 8000 series for high end Sea Islands*. I don't think either AMD nor Nvidia can wring too much more performance out of their present parts (Tahiti / Pitcairn/ GK 104/ GK 106) so things should stay relatively boring until one of the IHV's blinks first- though both seem happy to clear inventory and recoup some investment in their present cards. Nvidia's next release is shaping up to be a snoozer also ( the GTX 660 SE ).

*The dual GPU Sea Islands part is supposedly code named Aruba ( 1 Aruba = 2 Curacao !?)

 

[Per Hansson]

My head hurts, damn renaming bullshit!