On Tuesday during an IT Supply Chain conference, AMD CEO Rory Read confirmed that the company is now shipping its next-generation graphics cores -- which are fabricated using 28-nm process technology at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) fabs -- for revenue. Actual products won't be formally announced until CES 2012 next month, he said.
"We are ramping 28-nm [products] with TSMC in Taiwan and shipping the products here and now," he said. "We are very excited about the products."
AMD's CEO didn't actually detail a specific product, but there's speculation he may be referring to the "Tahiti" GPU, which will be used in the company's upcoming Radeon HD 7970 and HD 7950 solutions. Even more, there are reports that the Radeon HD 7970 will actually see a limited launch on December 22 followed by a full retail release on January 9 along with the Radeon HD 7950.
The Radeon HD 7950 will reportedly arrive as a custom solution, allowing AMD partners to clock each part to their specific needs. It will also be flexible in terms of the amount of memory and 3rd-party cooling. As for the HD 7970, it will be the fastest GPU in the 7000 "Southern Islands" Series, sporting a Tahiti XT core, 2048 streaming cores operating at a 925 MHz clock, 128 texture units and an estimated 300W TDP.
According to reports, both the HD 7970 and HD 7950 will be very long cards and sport a 384-bit memory bus connected to 3 GB of VRAM (twelve GDDR5 memory chips) working at 1.37 GHz (5.5 GHz effective) to deliver 264 GB/s of memory bandwidth. They will also have two 8-pin PCI Express power connectors.
Given that AMD hasn't made any official announcements, most of the information you see here stems from supposed leaks save for Read's confirmation. We expect to hear more in a few weeks when we step foot in Las Vegas during CES 2012.
