Stefan Mileschin

An AMD presentation slide was scored by OBR-Hardware, the site did not vouch for the authenticity of the slide, but reveals a new GPU codename, "Tenerife". The slide rings many bells. First, we know from a recent report by VR-Zone, that a new family of GPUs succeeding "Southern Islands" is codenamed something along the lines of "Sea Islands". Second, the source speculates the stream processor count of Tenerife to be 2304, which falls in line the "actual" stream processor count of Tahiti, that was revealed by a leaked company document belonging to Sapphire, which created some controversy in early January, which AMD later went on to quash.

The slide mentions "Tenerife" as being based on "Enhanced Graphics CoreNext" architecture, probably a tweaked-up GCN, which will probably characterize "Sea Islands" family. Enhanced GCN is mentioned as having 20% higher performance over the current architecture. The next most interesting bit is the mention of a tentative launch, mentioned as Q3-2012, at the earliest. This falls in line with speculation of Radeon HD 8000 series making it to the market no later than this year. The question here is could "Tenerife" be the GPU AMD builds its "Radeon HD 8900" series on, or could AMD do a "Radeon HD X1900" by surprising the high-end segment with a new GPU in the current series? "Tenerife" is probably named after the biggest of the Canary Islands, Spanish offshore territory.

http://www.techpowerup.com/161737/AM...ife-quot-.html