AMD Says It Started Shipping 28nm GPUs for Revenue

AMD has just officially announced that is has started shipping next-generation graphics cores fabricated using TSMC’s 28nm process technology for revenue, confirming rumors that suggested the company is getting ready to launch new GPUs at the start of next year.

"We are ramping 28nm [products] with TSMC in Taiwan and shipping the products here and now. 

“We are very excited about the products," said Rory Read, chief executive officer of AMD, during IT Supply Chain conference organized by Raymond James.

The company’s CEO hasn’t mentioned the names of these solutions, but he could be referring to the Tahiti GPU which is used for the company’s upcoming Radeon HD 7970 and HD 7950 solutions.

These have been previously rumored to launch on January 9, so Read’s announcement seems to confirm this date and leads Xbit Labs to believe that PC makers will start shipping Radeon HD 7000-series "Southern Islands" chips shortly after CES next month.

While no official information was provided by AMD, a recently leaked company slide has detailed the specifications of its highest performing single-GPU solution in the Radeon HD 7000 range.

The graphics card is called the Radeon HD 7970 and is built around the Tahiti XT core that includes 32 Compute Units for a total of 2048 streaming cores that operate at a 925MHz clock.

These seem to be accompanied by 128 texture units, 32 ROP units and by a 384-bit wide memory bus that is connected to 3GB of VRAM working at 1.37GHz (5.5GHz effective) to deliver 264GB/s of memory bandwidth.

The leaked slide also revealed that the TDP of the card is estimated at 300W, which isn’t a large departure from the Radeon’s HD 6970 250W rating.

More information regarding the Radeon HD 7900 product family should be available soon enough, so we’ll make sure to keep you up to date with how things evolve.

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