jmke

ATI IS ON A ROLL, having taped out its next generation GPU family called Southern Islands. ATI might call it the HD6xxx series, and it could be out before Nvidia gets its GTX4xx line of GPUs fully fleshed out and to market. The news is straightforward enough. Southern Islands (SI) taped out recently, and is now moving through TSMC. Although the schedule is very tight, if all goes really well we could see a demo or two at Computex in just over a month. This puts SI slightly behind where Evergreen was a year ago, but not by much.

Southern Islands is said to be a hybrid between the all new Northern Islands (NI) and the current HD5xxx Evergreen family. Those in the loop say that Northern Islands was meant to be on TSMC 32nm before that process was killed. Due to the ever-slipping nature of TSMC's 28nm high-K metal gate node, the SI hybrid GPU was slapped together to be fabbed on TSMC's current 40nm process.

http://www.semiaccurate.com/2010/04/...nds-tapes-out/

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