AMD spills beans on Northern Island codenames

Yes, Northern, not Southern

AMD APPEARS TO have slipped in the codenames for its entire Northern Island range of GPUs in its latest Catalyst 10.8 driver release. Confused? Well, it turns out that AMD had some internal naming issues as the 32nm Northern Island parts never happened thanks to TMSC pulling the plug on 32nm, but now the code names have been applied to AMD’s upcoming 40nm Evergreen refresh that is set to launch later this year.

The drivers don’t reveal too many details about AMD’s upcoming graphics cards, but it does suggest that there will be a lot of new models as there are no less than 35 different models listed in the new drivers. The codenames appear to have had a few additions since the first leak back in May and five out of the seven are located a lot further south now. It looks like the code names so far are Antilles, Barts, Caicos, Cayman, Turks, Blackcomb, Seymour and Whistler. So some of them are still stuck in Canuckistan, but we’re definitely looking at some sunny locations in the West Indies as well.

As always there are XT and PRO versions of most of the models, as well plenty of GL versions which are suggesting FirePro versions based on the various GPUs. There are also some LP versions which should be low profile and LE which tends to be mostly for cut down versions used by OEMs. 13 of the listed models are likely to be FirePro cards and a fair few should be mobile parts. Judging by the fact that there are only three code names that are assigned to Canadian locations, an educated guess suggests that these are likely to be mobile parts, while the West Indian islands are the desktop parts.

Some of the models also have the word Gemini after the suffix, but as there are only a total of six such models based on Seymour, Blackcomb and Whistler one has to wonder what this could relate to. It’s possible that this has something to do with AMD’s upcoming switchable graphics and that there are specific parts needed for this to work properly and as such AMD has given these parts a separate indicator.

There are 12 Cayman cards of which all but two have the GL suffix and the two that don’t are XT and Pro models. The Antilles consists of a mere two cards in Pro and XT flavours. Blackcomb appears to consist of XT, PRO and LP, but all three are also available with the Gemini suffix and the XT and PRO shares the same entry in the drivers. Bart appears to have two GL versions as well as an XT and PRO version. Whistler is yet another confusing entry as there’s an XT entry, a PRO/LP entry, an XT/PRO Gemini entry and finally an LP Gemini entry. Turks is only made up of three entries, XT, PRO and one that really stands out, ONEGA which is meant to be an older part(?). Seymour is the last model with the Gemini suffix and again it’s paired up with XT/PRO and LP parts, with and without the suffix. Finally we have Caicos which has one GL part, one PRO part and yet another oddity in the shape of the CASPIAN PRO.

We have put the full list of model names at the end of the article, but one thing is for sure, this leaves a lot of question marks as to what AMD is working on. If nothing else it does suggest that AMD is replacing its entire range of Evergreen parts with new models, both on the desktop and mobile side of things. However, it’s far too early to draw any conclusions; but nonetheless, it’s interesting to speculate a bit.S|A

223,CAYMAN GL XT (6700),NI CAYMAN
224,CAYMAN GL XT (6701),NI CAYMAN
225,CAYMAN GL XT (6702),NI CAYMAN
226,CAYMAN GL XT (6703),NI CAYMAN
227,CAYMAN GL PRO (6704),NI CAYMAN
228,CAYMAN GL PRO (6705),NI CAYMAN
229,CAYMAN GL (6706),NI CAYMAN
230,CAYMAN GL LE (6707),NI CAYMAN
231,CAYMAN GL (6708),NI CAYMAN
232,CAYMAN GL (6709),NI CAYMAN
233,CAYMAN XT (6718),NI CAYMAN
234,CAYMAN PRO (6719),NI CAYMAN
235,ANTILLES PRO (671C),NI CAYMAN
236,ANTILLES XT (671D),NI CAYMAN
237,BLACKCOMB XT/PRO (6720),NI BLACKCOMB
238,BLACKCOMB LP (6721),NI BLACKCOMB
239,BLACKCOMB XT/PRO Gemini (6724),NI BLACKCOMB
240,BLACKCOMB LP Gemini (6725),NI BLACKCOMB
241,BARTS GL XT (6728),NI BARTS
242,BARTS GL PRO (6729),NI BARTS
243,BARTS XT (6738),NI BARTS
244,BARTS PRO (6739),NI BARTS
245,WHISTLER XT (6740),NI WHISTLER
246,WHISTLER PRO/LP (6741),NI WHISTLER
247,WHISTLER XT/PRO Gemini (6744),NI WHISTLER
248,WHISTLER LP Gemini (6745),NI WHISTLER
249,ONEGA (6750),NI TURKS
250,TURKS XT (6758),NI TURKS
251,TURKS PRO (6759),NI TURKS
252,SEYMOUR XT/PRO (6760),NI SEYMOUR
253,SEYMOUR LP (6761),NI SEYMOUR
254,SEYMOUR XT/PRO Gemini (6764),NI SEYMOUR
255,SEYMOUR LP Gemini (6765),NI SEYMOUR
256,CAICOS GL PRO (6768),NI CAICOS
257,CASPIAN PRO (6770),NI CAICOS
258,CAICOS PRO (6779),NI CAICOS

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