AMD Radeon HD 8000 series specifications rumors

HardwareInfo came across a list of rumored specifications of AMD's Radeon HD 8000 series at Spanish tech site BitDreams. The data seems to resemble specifications that were leaked a couple of months ago, but as always, we suggest you take these rumors with a grain of salt. The launch date definitely seems to be off, the document still speaks of a Q4 2012 launch date for the Radeon HD 8950/8970, whereas recent rumors indicate it will be Q1 2013 and likely even Q2 2013 before these parts hit the market.

The HD 8000 series will get physically larger, according to the site. For example, the Tahiti GPU in the HD 7900 series has 4.31 billion transistors and 2,048 stream processors, and this will reportedly increase for the HD 8900 series by almost 20 percent to 5.1 billion transistors and 2,560 stream processors. The HD 8950 will have 212 fewer stream processors than the HD 8970. On both the HD 8970 and the HD 8950 the number of ROPs will increase by 50 percent to 48.

The GPU speed of both cards will increas to 1050 MHz, while the memory speeds will be 6000 MHz and 5500 MHz. This has an influence on the TDP, which will be 260 watts and 210 watts, respectively. The 3 GB of video memory will be controlled by a 384-bit memory bus. The HD 8990 will basically be a double HD 8970 with slightly lower clock speeds with twice the amount of video memory.