14 DAY TRIAL // Now that AMD only has three more low-end cards from the Radeon HD 6000 series to release, the company is starting to turn most of its attention towards its upcoming 28nm Southern Islands GPUs, and a recent report claims these are scheduled to enter mass production as soon as May, hinting at a June or July release date.
The report comes from the DigiTimes publication and quotes sources “from graphics card makers,” but, sadly, it doesn't reveal any other details about the chips.
However, the information available until now suggests that AMD's Southern Islands GPUs are based on the same architecture as that employed by the company in its current Cayman cores (found in the Radeon HD 6900 cards.
This will be tweaked for the 28nm manufacturing process and the smaller production node will allow AMD to install more streaming units inside the Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs.
At this point, we can only speculate about the performance of the new AMD graphics cores, but the advancement in fabrication technology could even allow a single-GPU HD 7000 to catch up with the current Radeon HD 6990.
The first batch of Southern Islands parts will be built by TSMC, with some of the later ones moving to GlobalFoundries if all goes well with its 28nm fabrication technology.
The new Radeon HD 7000 graphics card line will include both desktop as well as notebook parts and, from what we know until now, the mobile version of the GPU will come in four different flavors.
Previous leaks place the launch of the first Radeon 7000M GPUs in Q4 of 2011, which falls in line with the Q3 release of the desktop Southern Islands GPUs since AMD always intros the desktop version of its GPUs first.