14 DAY TRIAL // Though the ATI Radeon HD 5970 is, at present, the most powerful video board on the market, as far as reference models go at least, ATI seems to be getting ready to reveal its successor, a dual-chip board based on the Southern Island Architecture that will supposedly come out before the end of 2010.
So far, very little has been disclosed on the Southern Island family of graphics cards, except that its members will, obviously, be superior to the HD 5000 series, the so-called “Evergreen” line.
On the other hand, the upcoming series won't be very advanced in terms of feature-set, because they are based on the same process as the current offering, namely 40nm.
Thus, according to rumors that have been circulating on the Internet, the main focus will be on improving efficiency while keeping some of the building architectural blocks from the Evergreen generation.
Now, Cnbeta website reports that ATI is already planning the dual-GPU beast that will be tasked with keeping the performance crown in AMD's side of the field.
This model will use two of the Southern Islands chips and should be able to somehow stay under the standard 300W power envelope that large system builders rely on.
Like its peers, this invention should support a more advanced version of the UVD (Universal Video Decoder) and, thus, play high-quality videos with absolutely no problems and in UHD (ultra high definition) resolutions.
Nevertheless, the ability to up-convert Full-HD Blu-ray movies to higher resolutions is expected to be a more important selling point, since there are, currently, no UHD movies commercially available.
Finally, a superior version of the ATI Eyefinity technology is also expected to show up on the list of specifications.
The first Southern Island graphics solutions should debut in late October or Early November, which leaves the dual-chip monster to the later parts of the year.