AMD Unveils Preliminary Radeon HD 8000M Series Mobile GPU Details 51
MojoKid writes "AMD has just released some preliminary information regarding the company's upcoming Radeon HD 8000M series of mobile GPUs. Based on the naming convention alone, it may obvious that the Radeon HD 8000M series is AMD's second generation of products featuring the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture, which debuted in the Radeon HD 7000 series. Like its predecessors, the Radeon HD 8000M series targets gamers with full DirectX 11.1 support and improved gaming performance over the previous-gen, but the architecture also lends itself to GPU compute applications as well. The Radeon HD 8500M sports 384 Stream Processors with an Engine Clock up to 650MHz. Memory clocks will vary based on the use of GDDR3 or GDDR5 memory. The Radeon HD 8600M is essentially the same, but with a slightly higher Engine Clock up to 775MHz. The Radeon HD 8700M is also based on the same GPU, but will be clocked at up to 850MHz, for a further increase in performance over the 8600M. The Radeon HD 8800M series, however, is based on a larger, more powerful chip and will sport 640 Stream Processors with an engine clock of up to 700MHz. GDDR5 memory will be used exclusively with 8800M, at speeds up to 1125MHz. It will be interesting to see how these new GPUs stack up versus NVIDIA's latest GeForce 600M series of mobile chips."
Re:Linux drivers? (Score:5, Informative)
As the other A/C has pointed out... AMD only dropped support for older cards. Honestly the open source drivers are great.
My HTPC is a few years old, it has an onboard Radeon HD 3200 (ITX board). Again, using the open source Radeon drivers, it works excellent. Direct BluRay rips play flawless on 1080P display, audio over HDMI.
Recently received a new laptop as a gift. It has a Radeon HD 7500M in it. Using the open source drivers I have not had any problems. I don't play video games so I really can't tell you what to expect there, though.
It's been a rough road but KMS is starting to mature and "Just Works" in most sutations... I don't think the Ati Catalyst drivers support KMS yet.
Re:The most important question... (Score:3, Informative)
You are refering to techreport articles right? There might be a problem or there might not be. I certainly havent seen any micro-stuttering with my hd7850. The type of tests they do are veeeeeery easy to manipulate. You just have to select a different short scene to render if you dont like the results and voila the other card wins. Average framerates might not tell you everything but atleast they are harder to manipulate. (though techreport still has a tendency to measure much lower average FPS for AMD than competing review sites)