AMD has revealed as much as that it will launch the graphics architecture Southern Islands during Q4, but new rumors speak of additional details. AMD is said to be preparing a card sporting two GPUs to replace Radeon HD 5970.
AMD will most likely name the new graphics card family Radeon HD 6000 and as mentioned so many times in the past it is a new architecture, even though it has borrowed a lot from the current Evergreen architecture.
According to Asian site cnBeta.com AMD will be ready with the dual-GPU card close after launch. Whether this means from day one, or a launch later in Q4 is hard to day. This at least means that the higher performance hasn’t come at the cost of too much power being consumed, which is both impressive and important since AMD will be staying at the 40 nanometer node with the new architecture.
It also reveals that Southern Islands will be offering new features where it specifically mentions a new version of Universal Video Decoder that will support playback of Ultra High Definition Video (UHDV). This means resolutions up to, or maybe even over, 4096 x 2304 pixels.
This image standard isn’t expected to gain any kind of market presence until 2016-2020, but AMD is said to be working on a technology that scales up to regular 1080p Blu-ray movies to UHDV, which means we are only missing monitors and TVs that supports these kind of resolutions.
The information should of course be considered with a pinch of salt, but if AMD can optimize performance and keep the power drainage at the same level as the current generation it has come a long way. We hope AMD has something more to offer than just slightly better performance, but we will just have to wait and see.
