Thursday, August 12th 2010
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ATI Radeon HD 6000 Series ''Southern Islands'' Graphics Cards For Sale from November
Come this Winter, and things will heat up once again in the graphics card industry, with GPU vendors battling it out for the crucial Holidays shopping season. While AMD did not introduce any new GPUs after completing its ATI Radeon HD 5000 series launch itinerary, it did manage to grab significant amount of sales from its graphics rival NVIDIA. For this Winter, AMD and its partners will be in a position to launch the ATI Radeon HD 6000 series graphics processors, according to DigiTimes, citing sources from graphics card vendors.
It is also said that the Radeon HD 6000 series, codenamed "Southern Islands" (members of which are codenamed after islands in the Mediterranean Sea), will be built on TSMC's 40 nm manufacturing process. AMD had originally planned to build Southern Islands on TSMC's 32 nm process, but with the foundry skipping 32 nm bulk for 28 nm which will start operations only by the end of the year, AMD redrew its plans and stuck to the now-mature (stable) 40 nm process. Perhaps AMD learned a thing or two from a wide range of teething problems that plagued the 40 nm production line.
Source:
DigiTimes
It is also said that the Radeon HD 6000 series, codenamed "Southern Islands" (members of which are codenamed after islands in the Mediterranean Sea), will be built on TSMC's 40 nm manufacturing process. AMD had originally planned to build Southern Islands on TSMC's 32 nm process, but with the foundry skipping 32 nm bulk for 28 nm which will start operations only by the end of the year, AMD redrew its plans and stuck to the now-mature (stable) 40 nm process. Perhaps AMD learned a thing or two from a wide range of teething problems that plagued the 40 nm production line.
137 Comments on ATI Radeon HD 6000 Series ''Southern Islands'' Graphics Cards For Sale from November
If they are getting these cards with 40nm, double the shaders would just be another gtx 480 power drawer.
I hope they use lower nm memory gddr5, at least this would gain little more ghz and bandwidth.
There is not much achievement here, just another gtx 480 that is about to be made by ATI.
Unless ... the architecture of the card is changed :confused:?
If ATI is selling millions of these cards, and only a few thousand have issues. I would call that a success on their part. Of course if you have issues you will always feel like they are doing a poor job.
I use mine for more than playing games. It also runs my 46" TV with netflix, DVD's, home movies, etc....
Nvidia has had extra plugins to make this work in the past, now at least tehy have integrated audio, but they are still lacking in image quality for content.
As far as games go I believe they are tit for tat.
On the performance note - i dont think it's being designed to beat a GTX 480 and i doubt it will. It would require serious redesign (which it isn't) and a die shrink in process (which it isn't). All i know from some extensive reading about it is it's stop gap to fill the void between now and Northern Islands on 28nm. It's using some of that chips design tech (not a lot) and the rest is good old evergreen.
Remember kids, ATI gave the industry an astonishingly impressive line up last year (yes, last year) which gave us amazing performance with conservative power and noise. That was a great feat. NV came along with the GF100 half year later with a huffing and puffing powerful monster. It's hot and hungry for a reason and i think it's the most 40nm can do.
Nup, i think GTX 480 will remain the flawed king until NI comes out. But... even if SI only manages to match GTX 480 performance (especially in tesselated tasks) but more efficient than 5 series - to me thats a win.
4850=5750
4870=5770
etc.
But then again its just my opinion. :)
Seriously though are these cards going to be longer than 13"?
they should work on getting these cards smaller while having excellent performance.
He also has a video up: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fatQCQ9wdUI
But i really don't believe it until i see some sort of press release or article of some kind proving it. Even though he seems to be an honest person judging from all his past videos and his site. Still i'd rather have something concrete then just what one guys says.
EDIT: he has given me this link: www.maximumpc.com/article/news/rumor_amd_6xxx_series_gpus_slated_november
I asked for a link and he linked me to this:
www.maximumpc.com/article/news/rumor_amd_6xxx_series_gpus_slated_november
www.fudzilla.com/graphics/graphics/graphics/southern-islands-reportedly-coming-in-november
Any idea what the new will be? :wtf:
I think it will be somewhere in between. The driver issues aren't small. I understand that less have issues than don't, but that still doesn't make it acceptable. I've had some sort of bug or another since 8.11, thru about 10 different ATI combimations in single, double and triple setups. I am (was) a strong ATI supporter, but the driver quality keeps going down, whereas the driver quality of my nVidia setups has actually increased. ATI has some seriously kick ass hardware out there right now, and if I came across a really killer deal, I'd still get one. (Anybody wanna trade a 4870x2 with a DD full cover for a reference 5850? lol.)
Does that mean I think ATI is a terrible company? No, it doesn't. I just feel that they have shifted too much attention to hardware, and not enough to the software to control it. I haven't written them off forever. It's all cyclical. They'll come back around to suit my needs again. But if I'm gonna pay near retail prices, I'm going nVidia the next time around until ATI gets the Catalyst team back in gear.
I actually thought you were referring to gaming quality, but I'll comment on the video quality aspect anyway. For playback, I don't use any driver enhancements for my media with either nV or ATI. I use cpu decoding and filters. I even disable all the MS decoders. Thank you ffdshow. All of my screens are calibrated, and the quality is the same.
I do see your point tho. Better for the standard user in video playback. It does make ATI a good choice for that.
Although I would still likely choose nVidia for a low powered HTPC type of rig, only because CUDA decoding via CoreAVC is capable of accelerating more advanced h.264 features that DXVA can't. I wouldn't mind seeing that, along with 2GB per GPU standard. The wider bus would allow the use of lower powered and slower GDDR5, yet maintain high performance.