Could the AMD Radeon HD 9000 Series Launch this Year?

The AMD Radeon HD 9000 series have been speculation of many rumors in the past few days. Two respected sites are now claiming that we could see the AMD 9000 series as early as October this year. Previous rumors had the Volcanic Islands graphics cards launching sometime in the Q1 of 2014 but even those rumors have died down some. The current AMD Radeon HD 7000 series are getting long in the tooth and the AMD Radeon HD 8000 series are going to be rebranded and rebadged AMD Radeon HD 7000 series for OEMs only.

The first graphics cards to come out for the AMD Radeon HD 9000 series are rumored to be code-named “Curacao” and “Hainan” and will be based off the 28 nm GCN 2.0 architecture. Reportedly a refresh of the “Tahiti” and “Pitcairn” architectures respectively. What we have read is the new Curacao and Hainan chips will improve the front end of the architecture with four ACEs or asynchronous computing engines, three geometry engines, and more stream processors than its predecessor.

The rumors of exact numbers for the Curacao graphics processor is 2304 stream processors, 36 compute units, 144 texture units, 48 render back ends, and a 384 bit memory controller. Hainan graphics processors are going have 1792 stream processors, 28 compute units, 112 texture units, 32 render back ends, and a 256 bit memory controller. Now all of these numbers are rumors since nothing has been released officially for the AMD Radeon HD 9000 series of graphics cards. The front end for both what we are assuming will be the 9900 series with Curacao graphics chips and 9800 series with Hainan graphics chips will share the same front end that I mentioned earlier that is an upgrade to the current AMD Radeon HD 7000 series.

Videocardz.com is also reporting that the AMD Radeon HD 9970 could be faster than the recently released Nvidia GTX 780 but slower than the Nvidia GTX Titan. As they also put in their article is that if all of this is true then what will be the price of this piece of hardware to give it the edge over the Nvidia GTX 780 if it indeed is faster.

Later on we may see the 20 nm Curacao and Nainan chips that AMD has touted as the next new process but we have also learned that AMD’s partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company will not start their risk production using the 20 nm process. So while the AMD Radeon HD 9000 series may debut in October 2013, it may still be 2014 before we really see the next generation of graphics cards from AMD.

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