14 DAY TRIAL // Dell Germany has recently updated the product page for the 13-inch Vostro 3350 notebook, and, judging by its specs list, this seems to be the first laptop to get an AMD Radeon HD 7000-series graphics card based on the Southern Islands architecture.
The graphics card in question is the AMD Radeon HD 7450M, which Dell says it features 160 shader cores paired together with GDDR5 memory for a total bandwidth of 13GB/sec.
Even though there is the possibility that the name of the GPU might have been misspelled, the specs posted don't seem to resemble any of AMD's current HD 6000 mobile graphics cores.
Apart from the Radeon HD 7000 graphics card, the 13.3-inch Dell Vostro 3350 notebook is nothing out of the ordinary as users can configure it with one of three Intel Sandy Bridge processors (Core i3-2310M, i5-2410M, and i7-2620M) which can be paired together with up to 6GB of system memory.
Depending on the CPU chosen, as well as the other hardware options, the Dell Vostro 3350 can be purchased for as low as 489€ while the Radeon HD 7450M comes as a 60€ upgrade.
This sighting of the Radeon HD 7450M seems to confirm the rumors we reported about earlier today, which stated that AMD is getting ready to launch the Radeon HD 7000 GPU series, code named Southern Islands, in the third quarter of this year.
From what we know until now, the Radeon HD 7000 GPU series are based on the same VLIW4 arrangement introduced with the Cayman architecture (AMD HD 6900-series), but these are built with the 28nm manufacturing process.
The use of this fabrication node enabled AMD to lower the power requirements of the Southern Islands chips, while also increasing their graphics performance.
Earlier this month, an AMD official confirmed that the company will release a new series of graphics cores by the end of this year, but declined to reveal any other details. (via HardwareLuxx)