According to Chinese website EXPreview, AMD is planning to launch a new batch of graphics cards for laptops and other compact systems under the none-too surprising Radeon HD 8000M brand name.

There’s not that many news other than the fact that the new series is (allegedly) to be released during CES 2013. One of the details that we couldn’t have guessed is that AMD is apparently using the solar system for codenames, as opposed to the current Northern/Southern Islands designations.

AMD is skipping Mercury and moves straight to Venus and Mars, initially, but whether these are based on the current Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture or an updated GCN2 is not known. Both Nvidia and AMD have been mixing architectures no matter what model series they belong to in the past, so the solar system gimmick really says nothing of the manufacturer’s intentions.

Other specifications include support for DX 11.1, OpenGL 4.3 and OpenCL 1.2. Regardless of the architecture being used, the HD 8000M will still be based on the 28nm manufacturing process, so any dramatic improvement in power efficiency is unlikely.

Interestingly, Asus recently unveiled a VivoBook U38DT laptop – a 13.3-inch machine equipped with a HD 8550M, which some speculated might be a rebadged GPU from the HD 7000M series, but now it looks like it might be the real deal, an entirely new graphics card.