14 DAY TRIAL // After the series of rumors that have surfaced, saying that AMD's upcoming high-end graphics card would be released either in July or in August, there's finally something official coming from one of the company's representatives. According to Raja Koudri, worldwide CTO (Products Group) at AMD, the new "Spartan" card will be made available in August.
Raja Koudri also confirmed the fact that new graphics card would come in two flavors, which means that we're likely to have both a 2GB GDDR5 version and a 1GB GDDR3 model, although the representative refrained from confirming all the specifics. However, if this does turn out to be the case, each one of these cards will be priced differently and will be designed to meet the requirements of several types of high-end users. It is uncertain whether the 1GB GDDR3 version can top NVIDIA's GTX 280 in terms of performance, but the 2GB GDDR5 will most probably be able to accomplish this feat.
Koudri also said that AMD had built a desktop computer using its own 4870 X2 graphics cards, enabling an 8 GPU system configuration. Despite the fact that it is still unclear why AMD would experiment with the cards in this way, we can safely say that it does shed some light on what the future holds for AMD's graphics department, especially with its CrossFire technology.
Raja Koudri also talked about the future of Fusion, a concept that is yet in its 1st generation. According to Raja, AMD is considering taking Fusion further than just entry-level graphics, but that will probably not happen in the near future. For the time being, the 1st generation of Fusion will be aimed at the low-range market segment, although the company is planning at least a mid-range graphics built into its CPUs in the future.
Towards the end of the interview, Koudri also shed some light on the Puma platform - per his words, we are going to see a wide range of Puma-based laptops by Christmas this year.