AMD's Volcanic Islands graphic cards have been a hot topic since last week when it was revealed that the next generation GPU architecture could be headed for launch as early as Q4 2013. Today, Chiphell forum members have leaked what is supposed to be a architecture of the upcoming "Hawaii" GPU which is based on a 20 nano meter process.
AMD 20nm Volcanic Islands "Hawaii" Architecture Leaked?
The architecture in question is from the flagship 20nm Volcanic Islands chip "Hawaii" featuring 4096 stream processors. That's almost double to what we get in today's flagship Radeon HD 7970 GHz edition GPU. AMD hasn't taken such a big leap since Radeon HD 5870 which double the stream processor count to 1600 compared to 800 SPs on the Radeon HD 4870. The switch from AMD's VLIW4 (HD 6000 series) to GCN 1.0/1.1 (HD 7000) was more of a die shrink from 40nm to 28nm, but if this architecture shot holds any truth then AMD would not only be shrinking the die down to 20nm but also bring radical changes to the whole architecture.
| AMD Volcanic Islands "Hawaii" | AMD Southern Islands "Tahiti" | |
| Die Size | 20nm | 28nm |
| Stream Processors | 4096 | 2048 |
| Compute Units | 16 | 32 |
| TMUS | 256 | 128 |
| ROPS | 64 | 32 |
| Memory | 4 GB GDDR5 | 3 GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus | 512-bit | 384-bit |
*Hawaii specs are based on the leaked architecture shot
The 4096 stream processors would be arranged in 16 SPUs (Stream processor modules), each holding 64 processors split into 4 Compute modules and would feature 4 ACE (Asynchronous Compute Engines) units which accept data and pass it over to the SPUs for processing. The Volcanic Islands "Hawaii" chip would comes with 256 Texture mapping units or TMU and 64 ROPS (Raster operation Units). The most intresting thing about the architecture is that AMD would use a 512-bit memory bus instead of the 384-bit on current HD 7900 series parts which would allow for higher native VRAMs of 4 GB. In addition to the main parallel compute module (PCM), the Hawaii chip would also feature 8 SPMs (Serial processing modules) which allows for parallel computing and could be a dedicated HSA module.
There's alot more information that can be seen on the architecture shot but unfortunately most of it is blurred due to the picture being of lower resolution. We advise our readers to take the above posted information with a grain of salt since this could just be wishful thinking by the user or made up by him. Only time would tell whether this is the real deal or not. But we do have the slight bit of details that now confirm the existence of Volcanic Islands and their launch by the end of 2013 so stay tune for more news as soon as its available.
AMD Volcanic Islands "Hawaii" Architecture:
AMD Southern Islands "Tahiti" Architecture:
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