| Codename(s) | Southern Islands Cape Verde Pitcairn Tahiti New Zealand |
|---|---|
| Created in year | 2011 |
| Entry-level cards | 7570, 7650, 7670 |
| Mid-range cards | 7750, 7770, 7850, 7870 |
| High-end cards | 7950, 7970 |
| Enthusiast cards | 7990 |
| Direct3D support | Direct3D 11.1 |
| OpenCL support | OpenCL 1.2 |
| OpenGL support | OpenGL 4.2 |
| Predecessor | Northern Islands family |
The Southern Islands series is a family of Radeon GPUs developed by Advanced Micro Devices.[1] Products in the Southern Islands series will be based on the 28 nm manufacturing process. AMD will build 28 nm graphics chips at TSMC.[2]
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In 2010, the Northern and Southern Islands cards adopted the AMD Radeon brand name. The Southern Islands will be named the Radeon HD 7000 Series.
Early rumors said that this series would only be a die-shrink of the Radeon HD 6900 (Cayman) architecture.[3] However, later news revealed that the Southern Islands architecture is called Graphics Core Next Gen.[4][5]
These changes could lead to better utilization of the GPU for compute along with traditional graphics. This architecture is supposed to be integrated into the next line of AMD Fusion processors.
It is noteworthy that, as opposed to the Evergreen and Northern Islands GPU Families, the Southern Islands GPU Family has only 4 chips instead of 5, omitting the lowest end one (resp. Cedar and Caicos in previous families). This is due to the reason that this segment is now served by GPU cores integrated into AMD's CPU's.
Codenamed Tahiti, the Radeon HD 7900 series was announced on December 22, 2011 with availability expected on January 9, 2012. The annouced model, the Radeon HD 7970, has 2048 usable stream processors based on the new GCN architecture. The series will also include 3 GB GDDR5 memory, supporting up to six simultaneous displays connected to the DisplayPort 1.2 outputs.
The Southern Islands design was reportedly taped out in February 2011. AMD gave a preview of the new design at the AMD Fusion Development Summit (June 13-16, 2011).[9] On July 21, 2011, the company confirmed that it has working silicon in-house and it plans to release the first cards before the end of the year[10], the primary constraint being the stability of the 28 nm process at TSMC.[11] It has been speculated that AMD is to use a version of the 28 nm process that is optimized for low power/low clock chips in order to meet the Q1 2012 target. The primary competitor of Southern Islands, Nvidia Kepler (also manufactured at TSMC), is also expected to ship during Q1 2012, largely due to the immaturity of the 28 nm process.[12]
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