Advanced Micro Devices said on Tuesday that it had begun to ship its next-generation graphics processing units (GPUs) made using 28nm fabrication process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's fabs for revenue. The company is projected to formally unveil its future graphics products at the Consumer Electronics Show early in 2012.

"We are ramping 28nm [products] with TSMC in Taiwan and shipping the products here and now. We are very excited about the products," said Rory Read, chief executive officer of AMD, during IT Supply Chain conference organized by Raymond James.

For AMD, which promised to be the first to market with 28nm GPUs for a number of times this year, it is a good news to start not only producing such graphics processors at TSMC, but also to initiate revenue shipments of the parts. While we do not know for sure, it is very likely that PC makers will be able to start shipping systems featuring Radeon HD 7000-series "Southern Islands" chips shortly after CES next month.

The next generation of standalone graphics processors from AMD and Nvidia will feature considerably improved performance per watt and while they will still belong to the DirectX 11 generation, they will bring support for numerous new features and capabilities only possible with tangibly improved performance and refined architecture.

In fact, the first unofficial photos of the next-generation AMD Radeon HD graphics cards have already emerged. The new boards depictured are marked as “Tahiti” and are believed to belong to the top-of-the-range single-chip next-generation Radeon HD family. Based on AMD’s current nomenclature, the new graphics adapters will be called the Radeon HD 7900-series.

The forthcoming AMD Radeon HD 7900 “Tahiti” graphics cards are very long and carry twelve GDDR5 memory chips, which means that they use 384-bit memory bus. The novelties have two 8-pin PCI Express power connectors, something which points to rather high power consumption. Typically, photos of unreleased graphics adapters emerge shortly before their launch.

AMD’s Tahiti graphics processor belongs to the highly-anticipated Southern Islands family of chips. The new SI family will use new graphics architecture, feature a number of innovations as well as will be made using 28nm process technology.

AMD did not comment on the news-story.

Tags: AMD, ATI, Radeon, 28nm, Southern Islands, Tahiti