Although we’re a bit disappointed not to have received the new Radeon graphics up to now, we still didn’t have to wait for too long to get one. As usual, this was taken care of by AMD, but chips are obviously in good supply anyway, since we received the first branded model not too long ago too. This is very good news, as a low yield has been mentioned as one of the possible causes of the late presentation of the card and reception of the first actual models, but luckily, that’s not the issue here.
Another clever move by AMD is that they haven’t released a wide variety of models at once, instead opting for a moderate and thorough injection of the “Southern Islands” story to the market, as lithography advances, so as to prevent the possibility of the lack of a particular chip from the HD 7000 series on the market.
This is otherwise a customary problem whenever there’s a switch to a new production process, with AMD being the one to break the ice for a number of years now. If you recall NVIDIA’s switches to 55 and 40 nm lithography, you’ll remember that it was a pretty nauseous period for the company, even if they weren’t the first to descend into these values.
According to schedule
Finally, we got the first model from the HD 7000 lineup, which is the strongest single-GPU card in the world, named Radeon HD 7970. This system has become pretty straightforward with AMD, so it’s not hard to tell how the story would go on. We suppose that the next model to see the light of day is Radeon HD 7950, a derivative of the stronger model. The next step should be the first model targeting the mainstream market, and the family should be topped off by the model codenamed “New Zealand”, i.e. the strongest graphics card in the world containing two Tahiti GPUs.
We’re sorry for playing the crystal ball here, but as things have unravelled this exact way twice before already, it’s hard to envisage a different scenario for this series. The HD 5800 series went the same way, as did Cayman-based models. Only Barts-based cards differ from this retrospective dynamics, as well as the fact that there was no mid-range Radeon based on VLIW5 architecture, but this doesn’t change the fact that the basic steps when presenting new Radeons haven’t changed significantly in the past 3-4 years, tracking the very same scenario back to HD 4000 series.
