[NextGen_Gamer]

I realize that VR-News already has a story on this, but I thought the title they gave it was slightly confusing and not eye-catching enough. And since this is huge news, it deserves to be known.

AMD originally wanted a brand-new architecture (the first since Radeon HD 2000 series) on TSMC's 32-nm node, and it was codenamed "Northern Islands." Then they hit a snag: TSMC cancelled their 32-nm, instead deciding to go straight to 28-nm in 2011. At this point, a new family codename called "Souther Islands" came about; apparently it was still 40-nm, and would be a more efficient version of "Evergreen" (Radeon HD 5000 series).

This is not true. The upcoming Radeon HD 6000 series IS "Northern Islands" and IS a brand-new architecture. After the 32-nm process was cancelled, AMD moved "Northern Islands" back to the 40-nm node (obviously it probably lost a few shader/texture/pixel units to what AMD had planned for 32-nm), and also started work on "Southern Islands." The "Southern Islands" family will be a 28-nm die-shrink of "Northern Islands" and will most likely be manufactured at Globalfoundries (though it could still be TSMC, or even both).

The end point to take away is that the Radeon HD 6000 series is a new architecture, and that more than helps explains some of these insane early benchmarks that have been floating around. Die sizes are said to be about 10-15% bigger across the board, but the performance also looks to be 60%+ higher in some cases; more than a fair tradeoff. It's time to get excited for new GPUs again.

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[psolord]

Ooh ooh ooh, I am getting excited. Crap I will have to sell my 5850s for nothing, but oh what the hell. They served me well for a year now. That is if AMD doesn't go berzerk and start charging, an arm, a leg, an eye ball and a ball.

Thanks for the reminder NGG!

[fahdriyami]

I think you seriously misread the article (if you've read it that is...), let me quote and important paragraph:

"Back to the NI family, what are they? Well, that part is easy enough, they are a serious re-do of the Evergreen family. The biggest change is in the shaders, they have gone from a 4 simple + 1 complex arrangement to a 4 medium complexity arrangement. This should end up no slower than the old way for simple calculations, the overwhelming majority of the workload, but also be faster for most of the complex operations."

And another quote:
"No, SI is real, it is the 28nm version of the chip that we have been calling Northern Islands for a few months now"

Only the codenames were mixed up. Whats coming in October is still a re-do of Evergreen and is still 40nm.

[power666]

Interestingly enough, the shader redesign may imply a decrease theoretical performance that is entirely offset due to increases in efficiency.

The other interesting bits about the architecture won't be known until closer to launch. I'm interested to see if they changed anything with respect to CrossFire scaling. From the leaked clock speeds of the GDDR5 memory, it does look like the memory controller got a revamp.

[NextGen_Gamer]

Originally Posted by fahdriyami

I think you seriously misread the article (if you've read it that is...), let me quote and important paragraph:

"Back to the NI family, what are they? Well, that part is easy enough, they are a serious re-do of the Evergreen family. The biggest change is in the shaders, they have gone from a 4 simple + 1 complex arrangement to a 4 medium complexity arrangement. This should end up no slower than the old way for simple calculations, the overwhelming majority of the workload, but also be faster for most of the complex operations."

And another quote:
"No, SI is real, it is the 28nm version of the chip that we have been calling Northern Islands for a few months now"

Only the codenames were mixed up. Whats coming in October is still a re-do of Evergreen and is still 40nm.

Going from a 4 simple + 1 complex unified shader setup to a 4 medium one is essentially a new architecture. It's a re-do of "Evergreen" in the same sense that Intel's "Conroe" was a re-do of the Pentium 4: both are still x86-64 CPUs, but obviously vastly different in terms of how information is processed and overall performance.