Back when Nvidia's GTX 700 series was detailed, it was quite clear that AMD will not be sitting idly and today we have some of the first information regarding AMD's upcoming codename Volcanic Islands family of GPUs that will apparently use a completely new GPU micro-architecture.
As you all know, AMD previously used VLIW5, VLIW4 and GCN architectures and judging by the leaked block-diagram of the codename "Hawaii" GPU that will be a part of the Volcanic Islands series, we might see a differentiation between serial and parallel cores. The parallel cores could handle tasks similar to what stream processors do while serial cores (based on either ARM or x86) could handle some other part of the GPU load.

The leaked slide is quite blurry but it looks to be real. The features of the leaked flagship part, codename "Hawaii", include 20nm manufacturing process, 4096 stream processors backed up by 16 serial processor cores, 256 TMUs, 64 ROPs and a 512-bit memory interface.

Of course, AMD will have to wait until TSMC gets the 20nm manufacturing process in line and it might be at least one of the reasons why we will not see the AMD's next-gen GPUs before late 2013. Of course, it will also leave AMD to battle the upcoming Nvidia lineup with current graphics cards, but its AMD Never Settle bundle deals are certainly doing a great job.



Source: Techpowerup.com, Chiphell.com.