AMD's First 28 nm GPUs in December

It looks like AMD will have the symbolic achievement of launching its first GPUs built on the new 28 nanometer process in 2011 itself. Sources told Heise.de that AMD is working towards launching some of its planned 28 nm GPUs in the second week of December, 2011. One of these sources specifically named December 06. Details on whether the launched GPU will be for the mobile (notebook) or desktop (graphics card) platforms; or even whether it will use the VLIW4 or so-called 'NextGen' compute architecture, are not known at this point.

Another source reinforced the theory that the launch will be more about symbolism than volume manufacturing for sales. It's likely that a small number of these GPUs will be manufactured, just about enough to send to OEMs for their qualification, and perhaps even the media for published performance testing. We expect these GPUs to be lower-end or mid-range GPUs, and since AMD is reserving the NextGen compute architecture for only the high-end GPU part, these ones will most likely use VLIW4.

Source: Heise.de, Image Courtesy: MarketWire