Apr 12, 2011 20:31 GMT  ·  By

Quite a few pieces of news about AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7000-series graphics cards have reached us lately, but few of them went into details regarding the architecture of the Southern Islands GPU and the reason for this could be extremely simple, as a recent report suggests that AMD's future graphics cores won't be anything but a die shrink of the current HD 6000 architecture.

AMD has launched the Radeon HD 6000 series in the last quarter of 2010 and the graphics card family is comprised out of the Barts and Cayman cores.

Of the two, Cayman features a more advanced architecture with a redesigned shader arrangement that went form a VLIW5 configuration, which used four simple SIMD units and one complex t-unit (transcendental unit) in order to build a stream processing unit, to a VLIW4 configuration.

This packs four stream units which feature equal capabilities, and two of them are assigned with some special functions.

In practice, this approach offers the same performance as a VLIW5 configuration but occupies less die space and allows AMD to install more SP units in its graphics cores.

Furthermore, the Cayman GPU also packs two separate graphics engines with dual dispatch processors and tessellation units as well as a redesigned render back-end.

According to Fudzilla, all of these features will also make their way to the Southern Islands cores, but other architectural changes aren't expected, as the Radeon HD 7000 is just a die shrink of the current Cayman GPU.

However, performance won't remain the same as the 28nm manufacturing process will allow AMD to install more shader units, which could mean that a single HD 7900 GPU may be able to deliver Radeon HD 6990-like performance with ease.

AMD is expected to release more details about the Southern Islands architecture in June at the company's Fusion Development Summit.

The Radeon HD 7000-series GPUs could be released as soon as Q3 2011, as reports suggest AMD has taped out the first such chips sometime in February.