Reports on the Internet suggest that chip maker AMD will soon release three new 28 nm graphics processing units on the proven AMD Graphics Core Next architecture. What’s known now is that the upcoming GPUs will be called Iceland, Tonga and Hawaii XTX. While we have reported about some of them in the past, there are new details now.
The Iceland GPU looks like a mid-range solution that will first come to us as a mobile graphics solution. The chip may also find its place in desktop graphics cards too at a later point in time. When released the new GPU will retire the Cape Verde silicon and will compete with NVIDIA’s Maxwell GM107 graphics processor.
Tonga will be a Tahiti core with a 256-bit memory bus but despite this the new GPU will be launched on its own and will not serve as a Tahiti replacement. Graphics solutions based on both GPUs will co-exist on the market until AMD intros the Radeon 300 series.
The Hawaii XTX GPU will be AMD’s highest performing offer of the year. It will be a higher- clocked version of the Hawaii XT and will be officially released with the Radeon R9 295X.
The good news is that at least some of these GPUs will come with a few new architectural improvements. The first one of them is UAV (Unordered Access View) ordering, which is a copy of Intel’s PixelSync and is a special algorithm that solves three problems – order-independent transparency, complex scenes anti-aliasing (for example hair or fences) and shadows from transparent effects. The second one is Fast Conservative Rasterization, which is a hardware solution unlike the first one. It will greatly increase the speed of conservative rasterization, which means that complex scenes will be rendered much faster than before.
As of now there isn’t a time table that will show when the new GPUs will debut on the market but they will likely come out by the end of the year.
Source: Videocardz.com