AMD to Launch New Radeon Series Later this Week

The launch of AMD’s “Northern Islands” GPUs has been rumored for some time, but the company itself let the cat out of the bag during an earnings call last Thursday, which placed October 22 as being the official launch date. I don’t believe that the company admitted to the exact models being queued up for launch, but based on the most popular rumors, they will be the Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870.

Other rumors floating around have the HD 6800 series as being one where six monitors will be supported on a per-card basis, with the help of a DisplayPort hub, and one that performance-wise is going to give some seriously nice numbers when talking in $/FPS. Power consumption is also rumored to be much improved as well, despite the card’s still being built on a 40nm process.

Because AMD is sticking to 40nm, many believe that the new cards are not going to perform that much better than the last-gen parts, and it seems reasonable. Instead of focusing on performance alone, AMD has no doubt focused much more on features and refinements, while it waits out for smaller process builds to become more reasonable, such as ~22nm.

This Radeon launch looks to be quite a bit different from the others, because unlike usual launches where the highest-end part is launched first, rumors have it that the HD 6870 will be placed closer to the HD 5850, and HD 6850 to the HD 5770. Of course, only time will tell how much of this is true.

Above all, I can’t wait to see how the HD 6800’s tessellation and DX11 performance compares to NVIDIA’s Fermi. Should be interesting…

“AMD’s third quarter performance was highlighted by solid gross margin and a continued focus on profitability, despite weaker than expected consumer demand,” said Dirk Meyer, AMD president and CEO. “Our strategy to deliver platforms with superior visual experiences continues to resonate. We look forward to building on this momentum when we begin shipping our first AMD Fusion Accelerated Processor Units later this quarter.”