More and more rumors are spreading in the air that AMD may introduce their Radeon HD 9000 as early as in October. The company might skip the 8000 series since they have already sold out Radeon HD 8000 branded parts to OEM. The first Radeon HD 9000 parts we are looking forward to are Curaco and Hainan. These are 28nm chips, based on the GCN 2.0 architecture. This new architecture reportedly has an enhanced front-end with 4 computing engines (ACEs) along with three geometry engines, as well as increased number of stream processors.
Since at present AMD is selling re-badged Radeon HD 7000 products as Radeon HD 8000 series products to OEM, so therefore it’s rational for the company to make use of Radeon HD 9000 series for its latest line of graphic cards.
The Curacao XT graphics processor is anticipated to feature 2304 stream processors (36 compute units), 144 texture units, 48 render back ends and 384-bit memory controller while the Hainan is expected to have 1792 stream processors (28 compute units), 112 texture units, 32 render back ends and 256-bit memory controller.
Both chips will contribute to the same front-end (just-like current-generation Radeon HD 7900 and 7800 do) with 4 asynchronous computing engines [ACEs], 3 geometry engines, command processor, worldwide data share and so on.
Source: Guru3D | News Archive