AMD's Southern Islands tapes out
Will we be seeing a new series of AMD GPUs to refresh their line-up this summer?آ Possibly, if this latest speculation is to be believed.
Spring is here and the birds are flying north from their winter hiding spots, and they bring with them news from the Southern Islands. With the migration CIrcle complete, the words from the birds is that the new AMD (NYSE: AMD ) GPU family taped out a while ago.
The SI tapeout happened in in February, more likely earlier than later, so lets call it 6 weeks ago. For those doing the math, both of the last two generations, Evergreen and Northern Islands, taped out later in the calendar year, and the resultant chips were launched in late Q3 or early Q4.
The SI/7xxx cards are a tweaked, more effiCIent, and polished Cayman/69xx design, so they should be pretty low risk, and the spins will be minimal. If all goes really well, think 6 weeks from mid-February, or about now, for silicon to come back from the fab, then 2 weeks for testing, and 3 months for production wafers to start popping up. That would put delivery of cards to users in late July with time to spare, add 6 weeks for a possible, even likely respin, and late August is the outer bound. Since this is a pretty low risk part, we don’t expect there to be many huge difficulties with the design.
SemiAccurate has the full story.The SI tapeout happened in in February, more likely earlier than later, so lets call it 6 weeks ago. For those doing the math, both of the last two generations, Evergreen and Northern Islands, taped out later in the calendar year, and the resultant chips were launched in late Q3 or early Q4.
The SI/7xxx cards are a tweaked, more effiCIent, and polished Cayman/69xx design, so they should be pretty low risk, and the spins will be minimal. If all goes really well, think 6 weeks from mid-February, or about now, for silicon to come back from the fab, then 2 weeks for testing, and 3 months for production wafers to start popping up. That would put delivery of cards to users in late July with time to spare, add 6 weeks for a possible, even likely respin, and late August is the outer bound. Since this is a pretty low risk part, we don’t expect there to be many huge difficulties with the design.
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AMD Catalyst 11.3 and 11.4 public preview drivers available for download
It's new AMD graphics driver time once again, squeezing in just before the month of March comes to an end.آ Here's what's new this time around:
Feature highlights: Seamless GPU Compute support
Highlights of the Linux AMD Catalystâ„¢ 11.3 release include:
New Features
Support for new Linux operating systems
The AMD Game web site has the latest WHQL driver set.آ If you'd rather try something even more exciting, then you can also now nab the Catalyst 11.4 preview driver, which has a lot more changes and improvements to offer users:- The AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing (APP) OpenCL runtime is now enabled by default within AMD Catalyst.آ Applications that leverage OpenCL for GPU based compute tasks will automatically benefit from the significant performance boost that this provides.
Highlights of the Linux AMD Catalystâ„¢ 11.3 release include:
New Features
Support for new Linux operating systems
- This release of AMD Catalystâ„¢ Linux introduces support for the following new operating systems:
AMD Catalystâ„¢ Driver 11.4 early Preview Features:
You can download the preview driver from this page.- Support for the AMD Radeonâ„¢ HD 6790 series of products
- A number of performance optimizations, as highlighted here:
- Performance enhancement for Shogun 2 (DX11 version) when running Anti-Aliasing
- Enhancements to the AMD Catalyst Control Centerâ„¢
- New task based Display Management controls
- Simplifies the configuration of displays and display settings
- New Eyefinity setup group
- Setting up an Eyefinity group has never been easier
- New branding (based on system configuration)
- AMD based platform آ – AMD VISION Engine Control Center
- Discrete AMD GPU with Intel CPU – AMD Catalyst Control Center™
- AMD Catalyst update notification (found within the Information Center)
- Please note this functionality is not yet enabled, but will be in a future AMD Catalyst release
- This feature will be used to notify users that new AMD Catalyst software packages are available
- New task based Display Management controls
- Includes fixes where Dragon Age 2 would hang in DirectX11 on ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5800 Series products.
- Includes fixes where MediaEspresso 6.5 and 6.0 may crash while initializing
- Includesآ aآ fix for game corruption issues in BulletStorm
- Includes a fix for the AMD Catalyst Control Center install; resolves the issue of not being able to launch CCC after Catalyst has finished installing
- Includes a fix for the Tessellation slider sometimes setting the incorrect value
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