"Sea Islands" Radeon HD 8800-Series Specs Revealed

AMD's Southern Islands GPU line-up was completed 6 months ago with the launch of the Pitcairn based Radeon HD 7800 series graphics cards. NVidia recently launched the GeForce GTX 650 and GTX 660, filling the line-up of GPU cores, and they set to launch a GTX 650 Ti to plug a large gap in their mid-range models. Now is the time we can start expecting leaks and rumors about next generation products. A contributor at read2ch.com has obliged with specs for the Sea Islands Radeon HD 8800 series graphics cards, using the Oland die, that will have 3.4 million transistors on a die sized between 270 - 280 mm².

Sea Islands GPUs will use the Second Generation Graphics Core Next (GCN2) architecture, and will be built on the same 28 nm process. Comparing Oland based GPUs with their Pitcairn counterparts, we see a performance improvement of between 54% and 75%. The source says the performance of Radeon HD 8870 is comparable to GeForce GTX 680, 30% faster than the GTX 660 Ti. Radeon HD 8850 is said to have similar performance to GTX 670, 35% faster than GTX 660. Memory bandwidth on both cards is 192 GB/s, 25% faster than Pitcairn, so it seems reasonable to assume it has a 256-bit bus and runs at 6 GHz (effective).

Radeon HD 8870 has a TDP of 160W, 9% lower than the 175W of the Radeon HD 7870, and the projected launch price will be 20% cheaper:

	Radeon HD 7870	Radeon HD 8870	Difference
GPU	Pitcairn XT	Oland XT
Transistors	2.8 billion	3.4 billion	+21%
Die Size	212 mm2	~275 mm2	+30%
Base Clock	1000 MHz	1050 MHz	+5%
Boost Clock		1100 MHz
Computing Performance SP	2.25 TFLOPS	3.94 TFLOPS	+75%
Computing Performance DP	160 GFLOPS	246 GFLOPS	+54%
Texture Units	80	112	+40%
Texture Fillrate	80 GT/s	123.2 GT/s	+65%
ROPs	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	32 GP/s	35.2 GP/s	+10%
Memory Bandwidth	153.6 GB/s	192 GB/s	+25%
TDP	175W	160W	-9%
MSRP	$349	$279	-20%

Radeon HD 8850 had TDP of 130W, identical to HD 7850, and costs 20% less. All this adds up to a very favorable performance/power/$ ratio improvement:

	Radeon HD 7850	Radeon HD 8850	Difference
GPU	Pitcairn Pro	Oland Pro
Transistors	2.8 billion	3.4 billion	+21%
Die Size	212 mm2	~275 mm2	+30%
Base Clock	860 MHz	925 MHz	+7%
Boost Clock		975 MHz
Computing Performance SP	1.76 TFLOPS	2.99 TFLOPS	+70%
Computing Performance DP	110 GFLOPS	187.2 GFLOPS	+70%
Texture Units	64	96	+70%
Texture Fillrate	55 GT/s	93.6 GT/s	+70%
ROPs	32	32
Pixel Fillrate	27.5 GT/s	31.2 GP/s	+13%
Memory Bandwidth	153.6 GB/s	192 GB/s	+25%
TDP	130W	130W	0%
MSRP	$249	$199	-20%

The source also mentions January 2013, which possibly is an expected launch window.