14 DAY TRIAL // Sunnyvale, California-based AMD has reportedly increased its order for GPU wafers from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC). According to a recent report, the two manufacturing companies have landed a combined order of 30,000 wafers from the chip maker, which will potentially use them for its upcoming graphics cards, slated for release in the second quarter of 2009.
In a recent news-article on Digitimes, citing the Chinese-language “Commercial Times,” AMD is said to have boosted its wafer orders from the aforementioned companies. The chip maker has ordered less than 2,000 wafers for January and February, but that volume doubled to about 4,000-5,000 units for the current month. In addition, the graphics chip maker is expected to further increase its order to about 8,000-9,000 wafers for the upcoming month, while for May and June, the volume will go up to 10,000 units.
Apparently, these wafers will largely be meant for the company's next-generation of graphics processors, based on the 55nm RV790 GPU and the 40nm RV740. These two GPUs will become available in April and will come in the form of the highly rumored HD 4890, designed for the high-end segment, and the HD 4750, which will compete in the mainstream-performance market segment.
These new cards should help AMD further increase its market share in the graphics computing market, where NVIDIA is still the number one player. In anticipation of their release, a series of leaked details have recently surfaced the Internet, providing computer enthusiasts with an early insight on the performance increase brought by AMD's next-generation graphics processors.
The Radeon HD 4890 is expected to debut in early April, while the first 40nm card is expected to be released later on. Early reviews of the HD 4890 have already surfaced on the Internet.