AMD Radeon HD 9000 series might arrive in October

More and rumors are circulating that AMD may introduce its Radeon HD 9000 as early as October. The company is anticipated to skip the 8000-series as it already sells Radeon HD 8000-branded parts to OEMs. The first Radeon HD 9000 family parts are anticipated to be Curacao and Hainan, two 28nm chips based on the GCN 2.0 architecture. The new architecture reportedly has an improved front-end with 4 asynchronous computing engines [ACEs] and 3 geometry engines, as well as a higher number of stream processors.

Since at present AMD sells re-badged Radeon HD 7000 products as Radeon HD 8000-series products to OEMs, it is logical for the company to utilize Radeon HD 9000 sequence for its new line of graphics cards. ATI Technologies’ original Radeon 9000-series products based on code-named R300-family graphics processing units revolutionized the market of graphics cards a decade ago and helped ATI (which now belongs to AMD) to become the producer of market leading graphics solutions.

The Curacao XT graphics processor is expected to feature 2304 stream processors (36 compute units), 144 texture units, 48 render back ends and 384-bit memory controller. The Hainan is projected to have 1792 stream processors (28 compute units), 112 texture units, 32 render back ends and 256-bit memory controller. Both chips will share the same front-end (just-like current-gen Radeon HD 7900 and 7800 do) with 4 asynchronous computing engines [ACEs], 3 geometry engines, command processor, global data share and so on.