AMD couldn't get past TSMC's issues with the 28nm process forces

Dec 7, 2011 08:53 GMT  ·  By

AMD promised us that by the end of this year the company will come up with its first graphics cores from the HD 7000-series, and these GPUs were just announced today.

Contrary to what everybody has thought however, the chips cover the notebook sector and are nothing more than rebrands of previous HD 6000M parts.

Traditionally AMD has launched its new series of graphics cards at the high-end and then continued with simpler solutions until it reached the value sector.

This time however things are different, as AMD has decided to start with the mobile version of these chips from the Radeon HD 7000M series which are nothing more than rebrands of their old Turks and Caicos GPUs.

While most of us were expecting Southern Island products based on TSMC’s new HKMG 28nm process, the fact of the matter is that TSMC is running late with its 28nm technology as yield and production capacities aren’t where they should be to allow for a 2011 launch of such products.

According to AnandTech, this left AMD in a particularly tough position as the company was concerned that they needed to get new mobile products out by the end of the year, so they were forced to make do with what they had.

There are some indications that 28nm parts could still arrive until the end of the year, but a complete launch is out of the question.

Moving to the parts that AMD introduced today, we see three products being released. Of the three, the Radeon HD 7600M and HD 7500M are based on the Whistler core (previously Turks) while the HD 7400M uses the Seymore XT GPU (previously Caicos).

Unfortunately, details for the new 7000M parts are lacking right now but the new parts should sport higher clocks than their predecessors.

All the HD 7000M parts can be configured with both GDDR5 or DDR3 memory depending on the price segment they target, and feature either a 128-bit or a 64-bit wide memory bus.

Of the three series announced, the HD 7500M is particularly interesting as it comes to bridge the gap between the HD 7600M and HD 7400M by pairing a 480-shader Whistler Pro GPU with a 64-bit wide memory bus.

This is of course going to hurt bandwidth, but notebook makers could still deliver some worthwhile solutions based on this GPU if they pair it with GDDR5 memory, which could enable the GPU to reach the same bandwidth as a similar 128-bit DDR3 equipped model.

All the Radeon HD 7000M parts announced by AMD today should already be available in quite few notebooks, so we should be able to see soon enough how these perform in real life scenarios.

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