Some new information has been leaked regarding AMD's HD 9970 GPU, the flagship part of the Volcanic Island series. According to Softpedia, the lineup of 9000-series GPUs will still launch this year.
The information revealed is that the Volcanic Islands GPUs will be baked on a 20 nm lithography and be designed to have Gate-Last transistors.
Specifications for the HD 9970 include 4096 stream processors, four geometry engines, 256 TMUs, 16 serial processing units, and 64 ROPs. Memory will be driven through a 512-bit memory bus, and GDDR5 memory.
While there has been no official word, it appears that the HD 8000 series GPUs will be skipped entirely for desktops.