Expect significantly more performance that from AMD's current GPUs

Nov 9, 2011 22:01 GMT  ·  By

Awaited with great interest by gamers and enthusiasts alike, AMD's Tahiti graphics cores, which will most probably arrive in the company's Radeon HD 7900 product line, are expected to get released in January of 2012, according to a recent report.

Graphics cards based on the Tahiti GPU will come as a replacement for the company's current Radeon HD 6900 range and AMD plans to build two different SKUs of this chip, dubbed Tahiti Pro and Tahiti XT.

A dual-GPU version will also be released later in 2012, possibly until the end of Q1 2012, which will most probably be known as the Radeon HD 7990.

All three of these graphics cards will be significantly more powerful than their current counterparts, reports Fudzilla, since the move to the 28nm fabrication process enabled the chip maker to improve upon the specifications of its GPUs.

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.

AMD said during a previous event that the new cooling solution brings a series of improvements over the old technology while also being easier to manufacture.

Radeon HD 7900-series cards use AMD's Next Generation Core (NGC) architecture that was designed to offer improved performance and functionality in GPGPU environments.

Before coming out with the Radeon HD 7900 parts, AMD will release a series of mid-range models that are designed to feature the VLIW4 (very-long instruction word) architecture introduced with the Radeon HD 6900-series GPUs.

These entry-level and mid-range Radeon HD 7000 GPUs will be known by the code name of Thames and Lombok.

Nvidia's next-generation graphics cores, built using the same 28nm TSMC fabrication node and code named Kepler, will also arrive in 2012 and will be officially announced in December of this year, according to a recent report.

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