AMD Moves to Sea Islands, Volcanic Islands for GPU Names

As 2012 and AMD's current 7000-series GPU generation comes to a close, there is word on the upcoming code names the company's next graphics processors.

As VR-Zone reports, AMD's will shift from the previous Northern Islands and current Southern Islands to Sea Islands (SI) in 2013, Volcanic Islands in 2014 and Pirate Islands in 2015. The first example of Sea Islands is the recently uncovered Oland, a small Island in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Sweden.

The choice of code names is not quite as interesting, but typically much more complex than thought. Not only are those names exposed to potential negative public opinion and potentially negative connotations, but they can also collide with trademarks and copyright issues. Over at Intel, Russ Hampsten, who is frequently involved in code-naming products at the blue team, recently described the task of finding code-names as "the most thankless job you ever do." Primarily because of legal implications, code-names often use geographic items.

The SI Oland GPU will debut as the Radeon HD 8800 series and will debut as a 28 nm chip with 3.4 billion transistors. Compared to the current 7800 generation, the 8800 series will be featuring a significant jump in floating point performance and texture fill rates.

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