Industry sources told the German news company Heise Online that Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is targeting December the 6th as its target launch date, for the first of its 28nm codename “Southern Island” video cards. Although there was no specific information on the models due for release on this date but as speculated before we expect these to be low to mid range performance models. AMD will be releasing these in very limited quantities for this year since production is still at quite an early stage but later into next year supply should start to increase substantially.
If Heise Online is correct then on December the 6th AMD will announce its HD 7000 series of GPU family which interestingly will use Rambus’ XDR2 DRAM memory as opposed to the current standard GDDR5. They will also utilise MIMD instruction sets in favour of VLIW instruction sets (except on 7570 and 7670 models) as well as support for PowerTune as well as x86 addressing and Partially Resident Textures. TSMC, the producer of AMD’s 28nm GPU family, has reportedly increased prices due to much higher than expected demand and Xbit-Labs speculates that the capacity of TSMC for the rest of this year is only 7000-10000 units.
