AMD Southern Islands 28nm Chips Begin Production in Second Quarter

While announcements of new products haven't been all that many over the past month, the rumor mill appears to have gone on with its turning well enough, even stating that AMD would soon start work on 28nm-based products.

Those keeping tracks of things on the graphics cards market will know that AMD and NVIDIA are more or less overdue for a manufacturing process advancement.

Mostly, they have been basing their new video products on the 40nm node for too long and have only failed to move on because of how TSMC changed its plans about process progression.

This caused both aforementioned GPU giants to build their DirectX 11 products on a technology that is getting surpassed.

That said, Advanced Micro Devices is devising the Southern Islands GPUs (graphics processing units), and it seems that they may just take advantage of the foundry's 28nm process.

Currently, the AMD's best GPUs are the Northern Islands used in the Radeon HD 6000 series of video controllers.

That said, very little is actually known about their successors, except that there should be some similarities.

Considering the previous report regarding TSMC's 28node, and how it is only making 28LP wafers so far, one can speculate somewhat on the upcoming units.

The first specimen will likely use the 28HP or 28HPL process technology and allow Advanced Micro Devices to gain experience, so to speak, before really kicking off mass production.

There is also the fact that, for the ongoing year (2011), the 28nm orders will only account for 2%-3% of TSMC's total revenue, so there won't actually be a flood of Southern Islands products.

Nevertheless, if things go well, the first shipments, regardless of how small, should be ready fro the second or third quarters.

Needless to say, neither TSMC nor the Sunnyvale, California-based company itself offered any sort of comment on these rumors.