For the past few years, both AMD and Nvidia have leaned heavily on rebadged products when they introduced new hardware. This has generally led to widespread confusion and generally made the relationship between model number, performance, and power consumption even harder to track than it already is.
With the HD 8000 family, AMD is taking steps to simplify its product lineup, standardize on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, and set the stage for further advances in 2013. Let’s tackle those one at a time. Up until now, the HD 7000M midrange parts have been rebadged 40nm hardware. The new HD 8500 and HD 8600 chips will resolve that, and give AMD’s midrange a 28nm footing. That’s good news for the company, particularly given the emphasis on ultra-thin form factors and long battery life.
In the midrange, this is a unilateral upgrade. AMD’s performance figures predict a 20-30% gain over the company’s previous midrange parts — again, a nice boost.
The HD 8700 and 8800M, however, are a bit of a different story. Their counterparts in the HD 7700 and HD 7800 family are already based on 28nm GCN hardware — so what new capabilities do the updates bring to the table? Here, AMD was a bit cagey. According to the product marketing manager for AMD’s Notebook Graphics, Jay Marsden, the 8700 and 8800 tweak the underlying GCN architecture, optimize software code, improve PowerTune features, and generally improve performance-per-watt. AMD says these are new cores, but it’s not calling them Gen 2 of Graphics Core Next, either.
AMD’s re-trenching of the HD 8800M as a midrange part is, I think, partly an admission of the upward fight it faces against Nvidia’s Kepler. It also suggests that the company may have pursued a similar strategy to what it used for the HD 6000 family. Then, TSMC’s 40nm troubles necessitated a split GPU strategy. The HD 6800 family on the desktop was an improved version of the HD 5000 cards. The HD 6900 series was something different. That GPU, Cayman, was a VLIW4 design that debuted a bit later, and bridged the engineering gap between HD 5000 and GCN.
For AMD’s midrange chips, this is a definite upgrade. The HD 7700M and 7800M should still see benefits. A few months into 2013 we’ll likely see a further follow-up that takes the title of GCN 2. In the meantime, this is a move in the right direction. Cleaning up product SKUs and rolling out 28nm-era technology is the right move, though we’d feel more comfortable if AMD’s published benchmarks were a bit more comparative with NV hardware.