14 DAY TRIAL // At the end of last week, we reported that AMD is planning to launch its upcoming high-end Radeon HD 7900 graphics cards based on the Tahiti architecture in January of 2012, but reports suggest that the Sunnyvale-based chip maker has run into a series of production problems that could postpone the release of these GPUs.
According to a post on the XtremeSystems forum, releasing Tahiti at the beginning of the next year has become a great challenge for AMD as is facing a series of manufacturing problems.
These seem to be caused by the chip's very large die size, 384-bit wide memory bus interface and high VRAM clocks.
Furthermore, AMD also seems to be facing problems with the support for PCI Express 3.0 and other new technologies introduced in the Tahiti GPU.
All these manufacturing issues are accentuated by TSMC's low yields for the 28nm node, so AMD seems to have a lot of things to sort out before it's ready to launch the first Radeon HD 7900 parts.
The Chinese source cited also gives us some information regarding the performance we should expect from these next-gen Radeon HD 700 parts (not necessarily Tahiti) as it states that some of the single-GPU cards should be able to get more than P45,000 marks in 3DMark Vantage.
AMD Radeon HD 7900 GPUs are based on the Next Generation Core (NGC) architecture the company detailed at its Fusion summit and these cards were designed to improve performance and functionality of GPGPU computing in AMD's graphics cores.
In addition, both Radeon HD 7950 and Radeon HD 7970 reference designs will come with an improved cooling system that replaces the traditional vapor chamber technology used for high-end parts with a liquid chamber.
No other information regarding the AMD Tahiti GPUs is available at this time, but more leaks should appear in the near future.