14 DAY TRIAL // A new slide detailing AMD's upcoming entry-level Radeon HD 7000-series graphics processors made its way to the Web, revealing that these are nothing more than a die shrink of the current Turks and Caicos cores.
The slide appeared on the Chinese Chiphell forum and describes AMD's dual-GPU support for the company's current Llano APUs.
In addition to the names of the current Radeon HD 6000-series graphics cards compatible with AMD's Hybrid graphics technology, the document also reveals the designations of some new 7000-series GPUs and the cores that these are based upon.
According to this info, the budget HD 7000-series GPUs in AMD's lineup will be noting more than 28nm die shrinks of the current Radeon HD 6000 graphics card.
This was to be expected from a couple of reasons, the most important being that AMD needed to retain the VLIW5 architecture for some of its next-gen cards for Hybrid graphics to work together with Llano APUs.
In addition, this move also allows AMD to identify and resolve all the issues caused by the transition to a new manufacturing node.
The chip maker has done this before with the HD 4770 when it moved to 40nm, and the Turks and Caicos-based Radeon HD 7000 parts serve a similar purpose.
Outside of these entry-level GPUs, AMD will also release a series of mid-range and high-end solutions, the former using the VLIW4 architecture introduced with the Cayman core (Radeon HD 6900-series), while the latter will be based on the Next-Generation Core (NCG) Arch.
These GPUs will use the Tahiti GPU and it has been recently uncovered that they will pack a 384-bit wide memory interface, while also being compatible with the PCI Express 3.0 standard.
No details regarding the release of any of these graphics processors are available at this time.
