AMD’s 28nm Southern Islands GPU Codenames Revealed

AMDs 6000 series is done and it’s time to move onto the next generation. We knew about AMD’s 28nm Southern Islands GPU from their road-map some time ago, but that’s about it, nothing more. 3Dcenter.org has managed to get some more revealing details on the various SKUs that will be launching, hopefully by November.

Getting a head start on Nvidia

This leak was found in an early version of Catalyst 11.7 driver which details codenames for four GPUs. The first one called “Tahiti” will mostly be a high end desktop chip and will have two variants Tahiti Pro and Tahiti XT which will most likely replace the HD 6970 and the HD 6950. “Thames” could possibly be a low powered mobile chip for notebooks. Then we have “Lombok” which could be a desktop performance chip and will have a few variants, as well. Finally, “New Zealand” will go on to be a dual GPU desktop card so in all probability replace the HD 6990.

AMD’s next generation chips will continue using the VLIW4 SIMD design, which means there isn’t going to be any radical change in the architecture, just some tweaks to ring out more performance per watt. The new series will most likely be the 7000 series, and if all goes as planned, we should be good for a November launch.

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