14 DAY TRIAL // The code names of AMD's upcoming Southern Islands GPUs, which will power the company's next generation Radeon HD 7000 video cards, have just been leaked to reveal that the product family will be comprised of at least four different graphics cores.
The four GPUs that were listed in the changelog of the HWiNFO32 v3.73 tool (the application is available for download here) are called Tahiti, New Zealand, Thames and Lombok.
While this is the first time that we see some of these code names, Thames is a somewhat old acquaintance of ours as it has already been spotted in an older slide that detailed AMD's mobile Southern Islands solutions.
From that previous leak we do know that Thames is AMD's most basic mobile Radeon HD 7000 graphics card and that it delivers about two times the performance of the current Radeon HD 6400M GPUs.
Thames features a 128-bit memory bus, a 15W to 25W TDP and is expected to enter mass production in the fourth quarter of 2011.
Details about the rest of the GPUs are scarce at this time, but the Southern Islands architecture is basically a die shrink of the current Cayman core found inside the Radeon HD 6970.
However, the architecture will be tweaked for the 28nm manufacturing process and the smaller production node will allow AMD to install more streaming units inside the Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs.
The first batch of Southern Islands parts will be built by TSMC, with some of the later ones moving to GlobalFoundries if all goes well with its 28nm fabrication technology.
AMD hasn't made any official statements at this time regarding the release date of the Radeon HD 7000-series GPUs, but most of the available evidence seems to point out to an early Q3 launch, as the graphics cores are expected to enter mass production in May. (via TCMagazine)