14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices is hard at work on making the next generation of APUs, set for 2012 release, and leaks have now provided some information on the graphics component.
The IT industry definitely saw some talk about the 28nm manufacturing process, the one on which both NVIDIA's and AMD's next GPUs are going to be based.
In fact, NVIDIA's whole line of such GPUs was revealed by a leak not that long ago.
Now, a new leaked slide has stated that the 28nm graphics processing units (GPUs) from Advanced Micro Devices will be dubbed the Radeon HD 7000 line, though this was expected.
Indeed, the more relevant piece of info contained in that same leak, one that was also more or less expected, is about the GPUs that will be integrated into AMD's own chips.
For those that do not remember, AMD's 2012 APU (accelerated processing unit) lineup bears the name of Trinity.
What the Globalfoundries slide says is that the GPUs that will be part of these chips are members of the same Radeon HD 7000 series, the same as the ones that will spawn add-in boards and discrete cards (for laptops).
Considering that the current-generation APUs have Radeon HD 6000 series parts, this is not really surprising.
What does stand out is that VLIW-4 architecture is part of the list of assets, something that, currently, is only employed in the Radeon HD 6900 series.
The slide goes into some detail, confirming roadmaps saying that Trinity will use next-generation Piledriver architecture cores.
Overall, there should be a GLlops performance boost of about 50% compared to the Llano units (the so-called mainstream APUs of today).
This does not mean that real-world performance will be an extra half better, but there is no question that prospective customers can safely expect a major improvement.