14 DAY TRIAL // After yesterday we reported that both AMD's and Nvidia's next-generation graphics cards might face delays, a representative of the Sunnyvale-based company came out to reaffirm once more that the Radeon HD 7000-series, aka Southern Islands, will make its appearance by this year's end.
The statement was made during the company's Fusion Developer Summit which is taking place as we speak in Bellevue, Washington.
"In a couple of days you are going to hear about our exciting new graphics architecture that will be coming out later this year and will be utilized by our future APUs," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD products group notes Xbit Labs.
AMD's future Southern Islands graphics processing units are built using the 28nm fabrication process and are based on the same VLIW4 arrangement introduced with the Cayman architecture (AMD HD 6900-series).
However, this will receive some minor tweaks that are meant to improve the performance and the energy efficiency of the cores.
Combined with the increased number of shader processors and improved operating frequencies (both advancements are enabled by the new fabrication process), top of the line Radeon HD 7000 parts should be able to deliver the same performance that is now offered by dual-GPU solutions.
The first Radeon HD 7000-series GPUs will be manufactured by TSMC, but Globalfoundries is also expected to join the action later down the line, provided that everything goes well with their 28nm fabrication technology.
Just yesterday we reported that the manager of a major graphics card maker believed that both AMD's Southern Islands and Nvidia's Kepler architectures might face delays, which could push their launch in 2012.
The source based its claims on the fact that the two companies have been extremely secretive until now, since board partners are usually informed 3 to 6 months before the launch of a GPU about its existence.