14 DAY TRIAL // According to sources in Taiwan, Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices will beat its main rival NVIDIA in the race for the first DirectX 11-ready GPUs. The company has reportedly been ready to unveil the new models for some time now, but the much anticipated release has been stalled due to issues with TSMC's 40nm manufacturing process, which still requires some tuning. Despite the reported problems with 40nm chips, AMD is expected to announce its first DirectX 11-ready graphics accelerators by October this year.
Just days away from the Computex 2009 kickoff, details on AMD's next-generation GPUs emerge, with claims that the chip maker has an ace up its sleeve, compared to its main rival, NVIDIA. In a recent article, Tim Smalley from bit-tech cites Taiwanese sources close to both AMD and NVIDIA, which confirmed that the very first DirectX 11-ready GPUs would be announced in October this year, pretty much in line with the release of Microsoft's next-generation Windows 7 operating system.
Codenamed RV870, ATI's upcoming GPU will be at the base of a new family of video cards, which the chip maker intends to launch in the same way as the Radeon HD 3000 and 4000 series. This basically translates into the fact that we are going to see another dual-GPU high-end graphics card from ATI featuring the company's flagship GPU.
On the other side there's NVIDIA, which is said to have already taped out its GT300 GPU, but which also has problems with TSMC's 40nm node. The Santa Clara, California-based manufacturer will try to deliver a chip that will be ready to maximize performance and energy efficiency, as well as handle the general computing tasks that GeForce GPUs are known for. Unfortunately, a release date for NVIDIA's GT300 is yet to be confirmed.