14 DAY TRIAL // Even though by the end of this year both AMD and Nvidia are expected to launch their next series of graphics cards based on the Southern Islands and Kepler architectures, details about these GPUs are extremely scarce, making some believe that the release dates could be pushed into 2012.
“Usually we learn about new GPUs 3-6 months before [the launch],” said the manager of one major graphics card maker to the SweClockers publication.
“AMD and Nvidia are keeping quiet now. Perhaps they are just more secretive than usual, but more likely is that the next [generation] is far away. Both have competitive products out there now,” concluded the source who preferred to remain anonymous.
One of the reasons why both AMD and Nvidia would keep quiet about the release of these GPUs is that they might be facing delays with their chips.
This explanation is highly probable as Southern Islands and Kepler rely on TSMC's 28nm node (AMD will also manufacture a part of their HD 7000 chips at Globalfoundries), which might not be ready yet for volume production.
AMD's Southern Islands architecture is based on the VLIW4 design that was introduced together with the Radeon HD 6900 series graphics cards, but the smaller manufacturing process should enable the company to pack more shader processors inside their graphics cores.
Accompanied by higher operating frequencies, Southern Islands GPUs could be able to deliver performance similar to that of the Radeon HD 6990 using a single graphics processing unit.
On the other hand, Nvidia's Kepler architecture is said to deliver an estimated 3 to 4 times the performance per watt offered by Fermi.
The first Radeon HD 7000 and GTX 600 based graphics cards are expected to become available in the fall of this year, so we should find out pretty soon if these were indeed delayed or not.
UPDATE: AMD's Rick Bergman reaffirmed that Radeon HD 7000 Southern Islands will arrive before year end. Read more here.