AMD Starts Shipping 28 nm GPUs for Revenue

AMD CEO Rory Read, speaking at the IT Supply Chain conference organized by Raymond James this Tuesday, said that his company had begun shipping 28 nm GPUs for revenue (meaning, in volumes big enough to fetch revenue). With it, AMD fulfilled its promise to be the first to the market with GPUs built on the 28 nm silicon fab process. AMD's foundry partner for these chips is TSMC. "We are ramping 28nm [products] with TSMC in Taiwan and shipping the products here and now. We are very excited about the products," said Read.

At the upcoming CES event, AMD will formally unveil a range of products that will use its 28 nm GPUs. CES will give AMD a good opportunity to bag design wins with large volume manufacturers of notebooks and PCs. What this means for the enthusiast community is that whenever AMD does launch its Radeon HD 7900 series, it won't be a "paper-launch".

Source: X-bit Labs

GeForce Kepler 104 and 100 GPU Specifications Compiled

A quick stroll through our previous article about how the GeForce Kepler family of next-generation GPUs is laid out, would tell you that GeForce Kepler 104 (GK104), is going to be NVIDIA's answer to AMD's Tahiti. GK104 will be a high-performance (≠ high-end) GPU by NVIDIA that will have many of the features that were reserved for its previous high-end GPUs (such as a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface), but will not be NVIDIA's most powerful GPU in the series. The throne will be kept empty for GK100, which will comply with NVIDIA's "go all in" design ideology for high-end GPUs.

AMD Tahiti GPU Specifications Compiled

If the word on the optical fibers is true, we are less than a month away from the launch of AMD's next high-end graphics card family based on its next high-performance GPU, codenamed "Tahiti". According to 3DCenter, AMD will launch new graphics card models based on this GPU around January 10, 2012. It is expected that we'll learn a lot more about these GPUs, maybe even come across AIB-branded graphics cards, at the upcoming CES event.

3DCenter compiled specifications of "Tahiti", based on bits and pieces of information from various sources. The specs can be listed out as:

• 4.50 billion transistors, die-area of 380 mm², built on TSMC 28 nm process
• Advanced GCN 1D architecture
• 2048 1D processing cores
• 128 TMUs, 48 ROPs
• 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, memory clock slightly below 1 GHz, target bandwidth of 240~264 GB/s

In Gandhi's words, salt is as free as the air.

Radeon HD 7000M Mobile GPUs Slated For December Launch Tabled

Around the 9th of December, AMD will announce its first Radeon HD 7000M series graphics processors, beginning with mobile parts (for notebooks). There will be at least 16 models announced, all based on two silicons: "Thames" and "Seymour", and being carved out of toggling various components within those GPUs. The models AMD will be launching will span across the Radeon HD 7400M series, 7500M series, and 7600M series. Thames and Seymour are brand new chips built on the 28 nanometer silicon fabrication process, which will allow AMD more TDP headroom, which it can use to step up clock speeds.