AMD Plans to Introduce Next-Generation Radeon Graphics Later This Year

AMD's Southern Islands on Track for Release in 2011Advanced Micro Devices confirmed on Tuesday at its AMD Fusion Development Summit (AFDS) that it would release a new breed of graphics processing units (GPUs) later this year. Apparently, AMD's code-named Southern Island graphics processing units are on-track to be launched in 2011.

"In a couple of days you are going to hear about our exciting new graphics architecture that will be coming out later this year and will be utilized by our future APUs," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD products group.

During his keynote at the AFDS, Eric Demers, AMD corporate vice president and chief technology officer at graphics division of the company, will recap the evolution of GPUs in the recent years, including the latest VLIW5 and VLIW4 core architectures and instruction sets. But more importantly Mr. Demers will present an overview of the next generation of AMD cores under development, which will propel forward new capabilities and continue the GPU evolution.

While it is not completely clear what kind of peculiarities of next-generation graphics processors will be revealed at the summit, it is highly likely that going forward both AMD and its arch-rival Nvidia will attempt to make GPUs more programmable and better suitable not only for graphics processing, but also for complex computing.

Later during this year AMD is projected to release its first graphics processing units made using 28nm process technology code-named Southern Islands. The SI family is projected to support DirectX 11 functionality along with architectural improvements and some new features. Theoretically, the company may start revealing architectural peculiarities about the chips behind closed doors in order to let software designers to prepare their software for new chips.

source: www.xbitlabs.com