14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices may be working on its Fusion chips, but it is also developing a new batch of graphics cards meant to give NVIDIA some hard time once November finally kicks in, at least this is what the most recent related report from Digitimes appears to suggest.
Since NVIDIA will soon manage to cover the entire DirectX 11 market with its GF106 and GF108 products and, thus, catch up to its rival, AMD, naturally, wishes to move another step ahead.
Originally, AMD intended to create 32nm-based GPUs that would have led to the creation of the Northern Islands family of graphics processors.
This will no longer come to pass because TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) decided to jump straight to the 28nm node.
As such, the Sunnyvale, California-based GPU maker resolved to continue making use of the 40nm chips and modified the name of the new batch of GPUs to Southern Islands.
Until this new series debuts, AMD will supposedly strategically cut the prices of its existing HD 5000 cards (HD 5830 is already cheaper).
On the other hand, said price cuts won't be too massive, because the outfit appears to be fairly sure that its market share isn't overly threatened.
The approach of the new devices is likely the reason behind the outfit's confidence that its market share is not threatened by NVIDIA, even though the latter's GTX 460 received accolades in reviews, more or less.
Regardless, this year probably won't end without the GPU and CPU maker bringing out a new collection of DirectX 11-capable video controllers.
As it stands, the official announcement should be made sometime in October, after which actual sales will ramp up in November, at least according to sources from graphics cards players.
Predictably, the company itself chose not to comment on rumors regarding unannounced products.