14 DAY TRIAL // About a month ago, during IDF 2011, AMD demonstrated a working 28nm graphics core from the Radeon HD 7000 series, and recently the Sunnyvale-based chip maker showed off this GPU yet again in order to put to rest all the rumors suggesting that Southern Islands won't come out until 2012.
The demo was apparently similar to the last one with AMD presenting a mobile 28nm GPU running Dragon Age 2, and this wasn't accompanied by any new info regarding the state of the HD 7000 series.
"AMD strives to be at the forefront of every key inflection point in graphics technology, as demonstrated by our leadership in everything from process node transitions, to adoption of the latest graphics memory," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD's Graphics Division.
"Our pace-setting transition to the 28nm process node, coupled with new innovations in our underlying graphics architecture, is already generating excitement among the ODM community here in Taipei this week," concluded the company's rep.
From the information available until now, we know that AMD's Radeon HD 7000 product family will use two different architectures.
The first solutions to arrive will use the VLIW4 shader arrangement introduced with the Radeon HD 6900 series, while the second wave of GPUs will include high-performance parts based on the Next Generation Core (NCG) architecture.
We talked about this new Arch in detail in some of our previous articles, so we are not going to get into this now, but the key aspect of NCG is that it will improve the performance and functionality of GPGPU computing.
The release date of these GPUs is still unknown as lately there have been various rumors suggesting that AMD has postponed the launch of the Radeon HD 7000 product family to 2012.
According to these reports, the main culprit is TSMC's inability to achieve the 28nm yields required for a 2011 launch, but AMD could also be facing some fabrication issues as the company didn't have a pipecleaner for the 28nm process as it was the case with the move to 40nm.