AMD Radeon HD 7000M Series

AMD has shown 2012, its at CES, known by the codename “Trinity”, APU (accelerated processing unit) generation and also about the GPU (graphics processing units) of the “Radeon HD 7000M series” spoken for notebooks. In this context, the chip maker turned out, that 7000M-GPUs to appear very soon mobile, manufactured in the 28-nanometer manufacturing process.

However, to which new GPUs it will here be in detail, and it eventually should follow the naming scheme was not yet clear. There are already some notebook models with GPUs of the 7000M-Serie in trade recently – they are all only unnamed models of the predecessor series “Radeon HD 6000M” and thus continue to be made in the 40-nanometer process. The subject website Anandtech.com had the opportunity to maintain more detail on the subject with representatives of AMD and then luckily could explain the strategy behind the Radeon HD 7000M series.

The GPUs of the model series are all named VLIW5 GPUs of the 6000M-Serie 7400M, 7500M, 7600M. These GPUs defends AMD itself somewhat, however, simply to refer to “renamed”, to read as in the report of Anandtech.com is. -The company prefers to speak of the term “recycled”. – But the fact is, “renamed” comes close already quite the thing. The 7000M-GPUs have been published so far are based on the Northern Islands architecture of predecessors and are produced in the 40-nanometer process. Of course AMD has can optimize this process in the course of time, therefore, customers should expect even minimally better performance and energy efficiency of the chips as still in GPUs from older production series, as Anandtech.com noted. To hold remains, Northern Islands GPUs used AMD for the lower and middle price segment in the 7000M-Serie.

AMD’s remarks against Anandtech.com are really interesting now, you will be using the “Radeon HD 7000M series” drive a two-track strategy. Internally, the company had drawn a clear dividing line and behind the GPUs of the 7600M-Serie. Including these models is only around 40-nanometer chips with known VLIW5 architecture, from the models of the 7700M-Reihe and in addition be 28-nm GPUs with GCN (graphics core next) architecture used, so AMD.

This mobile GPUs should be variants of the graphics processors referred to in the development as “Pitcairn” and “Cape Verde”, which however eaten less power. “Tahiti” GPUs are reserved the desktop graphics cards market for the foreseeable, according to the report of the Web page. The new features of GCN architecture, such as DirectX 11.1 support, VCE (video codec engine) and “Zero Core Power Technology” supports the new high-performance 7000M-Chips, when they come onto the market, the AMD staff confirmed this.

AMD called still no concrete date of publishing for this really new 28-nm GPUs, but there are numerous references, probably in April or at the latest should be so far with the start of the market. AMD then sends representatives of the southern islands GPU family in the running for the best benchmark results of mobile graphics cards.