AMD Radeon HD 7000 Launch Apparently Delayed to 2012

As we get nearer to the end of 2011, it seems like more and more sources are starting to imply that AMD's next-generation Radeon HD 7000 graphics cards won't actually get released by the end of this year, but instead will arrive in the first quarter of 2012.

This time, the information comes from the Rage3D website which cites some unnamed sources.

According to these sources, the problems seem to come from the production side, possibly indicating that TSMC is having troubles with volume production of chips based on the advanced 28nm node.

This isn't the first time we hear that the Taiwanese foundry is having issues with the yields of its 28nm fabrication process, which has entered volume production in the last week of October.

AMD's Radeon HD 7000 graphics cores, known under the code name of Southern Islands, will be split by the chip maker into two different product families.

The first of these will target low- and mid-range graphics solutions and will be based on the same VLIW4 architecture AMD introduced with the Radeon HD 6900 GPU series.

These will be the first to arrive, while later in 2012 AMD will introduce Radeon HD 7900 GPUs based on the Next Generation Core (NGC) architecture.

NCG was specially designed in order to break free from the VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture and should improve performance and functionality of GPGPU computing in AMD's graphics cores.

The entry-level and mid-range Radeon HD 7000 GPUs will be known by the code name of Thames and Lombok, while the NCG HD 7900 series will use the Tahiti designation.

Nvidia's next-generation graphics cores, built using the same 28nm TSMC fabrication node and code named Kepler, will also arrive in 2012 and will be officially announced in December of this year, according to a recent report.

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