AMD Volcanic Islands GPUs expected by year-end

TechPowerUp picked up rumors about AMD's next-generation Volcanic Islands graphics cards at Asian tech site ChipHell. Anticipated to be launched by the end of the year, the new Volcanic Islands GPUs will be made on TSMC's 20nm process, and if the rumors are right, the chip seems to be a big change in architecture versus the current generation. A diagram of the flagship, codenamed Hawaii, is pictured below.

Over the past three GPU generations that used VLIW5, VLIW4, and Graphics CoreNext SIMD architectures, the component hierarchy was essentially untouched. According to an early block-diagram of one of the GPUs in the series, codenamed "Hawaii," AMD will designate parallel and serial computing units. Serial cores based on either of the two architectures AMD is licensed to use (x86 and ARM), could handle part of the graphics processing load. The stream processors of today make up the GPU's parallel processing machinery.

The source that leaked the block-diagram also posted specifications of the chip that's codenamed "Hawaii," which appears to be the flagship part.

20 nm silicon fab process

4096 stream processors

16 serial processor cores

4 geometry engines

256 TMUs

64 ROPs

512-bit GDDR5 memory interface