AMD 28nm Mobile Radeon GPUs to Arrive in Q2 2012

AMD’s release of the Radeon HD 7970 is only the first one in a long series of 28nm GPUs to arrive from the Sunnyvale-based chip maker, who is apparently planning to release a new series of high-end mobile graphics cores using this process technology in the second quarter of this year.

The upcoming mobile GPUs will be apparently based on the company’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and will include support for DirectX 11.1 as well as for a series of other new features.

According to a slide leaked by ComputerBase.de, these include new power management capabilities, improved display features and some image enhancement technologies.

The new 28nm GPUs will most probably be introduced by AMD in the Radeon HD 7000M product family which also includes a series of rebranded HD 6000M-series parts built using the 40nm fabrication process.

These rebranded solutions top with the Radeon 7600M series, so expect the GCN 28nm parts to be branded as the Radeon HD 7700M and higher.

In the first days of CES, AMD showcased a high-end Radeon HD 7000M-series GPU based on the Pitcairn core, which is expected to be branded as a Radeon HD 7900M part.

On the desktop side, Pitcairn will be available in two versions, dubbed Pitcairn XT and Pitcairn Pro, the former coming with 1408 stream processors and 88 texture units while the latter will be limited at 1280 shaders and 80 texture units.

The ROP count will be set at 34 units for both of these solutions while the available 256-bit wide memory bus can connect to either 1GB of 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

If we were to guess, we would say that the upcoming Radeon HD 7800M solutions will use the Cape Verde GPU which on the desktop side will power the company’s HD 7700-series graphics cards. However, only time can tell if we are right.