AMD Shipping 28nm GPUs

Advanced Micro Devices said on Tuesday that it had begun to ship its next-generation graphics processing units (GPUs) made using 28nm fabrication process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's fabs for revenue. The company is projected to formally unveil its future graphics products at the Consumer Electronics Show early in 2012.

"We are ramping 28nm [products] with TSMC in Taiwan and shipping the products here and now. We are very excited about the products," said Rory Read, chief executive officer of AMD, during IT Supply Chain conference organized by Raymond James.

For AMD, which promised to be the first to market with 28nm GPUs for a number of times this year, it is a good news to start not only producing such graphics processors at TSMC, but also to initiate revenue shipments of the parts. While we do not know for sure, it is very likely that PC makers will be able to start shipping systems featuring Radeon HD 7000-series "Southern Islands" chips shortly after CES next month.

The next generation of standalone graphics processors from AMD and Nvidia will feature considerably improved performance per watt and while they will still belong to the DirectX 11 generation, they will bring support for numerous new features and capabilities only possible with tangibly improved performance and refined architecture.