facebook rss twitter

AMD Radeon 6000-series GPUs expected to hit retail in November

by Pete Mason on 13 August 2010, 10:27

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qazj4

Add to My Vault: x

The Radeon HD 5000-series has been on the market for a little under a year now and despite NVIDIA's best efforts, the cards still offer competitive performance and great value for money.

However, news out of Taiwan is suggesting that AMD isn't resting on its laurels and that the company will launch a new family of GPUs sometime in November.

This isn't the first we've heard of the ‘Southern Islands' graphics cards and the dates actually line up quite well with the existing buzz.

Last month we caught wind of an interview with a marketing rep at HIS that pointed to an announcement in the fourth quarter of the year followed by retail availability at the start of 2011.

Is the 5000-series old-news already?

If the report from Digitimes is correct though, we could see these new chips even earlier.  The story suggests that AMD will take the wraps off of the new family in October with product launches coming the following month.

Don't expect too much from these new cards, though.  All of the news and rumours so far have the 6000-series pegged as a revision of the current Evergreen architecture, as opposed to a whole new design.

While ATI was planning to shrink the chips down to 32nm, it looks like they will be sticking with the familiar 40nm process used to make the current GPUs.  The reason given is that manufacturing partner TSMC is skipping straight to the more advanced 28nm technology, which Southern Islands' successor -Northern Islands - will use.

For the time being, ATI is staying mum on the matter.  With only two months until an official announcement, though, we really don't have very long to wait for conformation.



HEXUS Forums :: 33 Comments

Login with Forum Account

Don't have an account? Register today!
It's been on the cards for a while, assuming the rumour mill wasn't completely off track. It'll be interesting to see if the 68XX series will have a bigger die than the 58XX series or if it is just an improved architecture within the same size/power budget.

Presumably this will also be accompanied by a price reduction in the 5 series too.
GheeTsar
Presumably this will also be accompanied by a price reduction in the 5 series too.

With my 4870X2 on the blink, a reduction on the 5-series would be very gratefully received :)

With Nvidia still releasing there 400 series card's I can imagine there would be a temptation to kick back and relax for a while (or at least there would be for me :p ). So it's good to see AMD pushing forward with there plans. I wonder what Nvidia's response to this will be? Given how the 400-series have, imho, not done as well as some may have hoped, I'm guessing they aren't in a position to rush in another series and will just have to fall behind AMD.

I assume the 68XX series wouldn't be tied in with a DX12 release? I've actually yet to experience DX11 :p
GheeTsar
Presumably this will also be accompanied by a price reduction in the 5 series too.

That's exactly what the rumours are suggesting, which is fine by me. A 5850 under Ā£200 would be amazing value.
They can afford to reduce 5000 series prices, it's only lack of competition that's kept them so high. I will be very interested to see what changes they've made to the 6000 series - I'd expect some optimisation of shaders to improve performance, maybe some tweaks like individual shader clocks too.

The rest might be engineering tweaks to work around yield issues at TSMC, keeping the power draw down and helping out with supply issues.

Kirano, correct, 6000 is all DX11.
Price reduction - *drool*

That's great, but i can't help feeling that the software is going to end up lagging behind the hardware.