The Southern Islands series of GPUs have been eagerly anticipated by more than a few people. For the consumer it is a new GPU to drop in so they can play the latest games at max resolution. For AMD it represents a chance to pick up some market share. Lastly for the industry it is a chance to see if AMD’s architectural changes will actually work.

Right now from all the information available AMD is trying to cater to both graphics and compute operations. This is something that they have not been able to pull off in previous GPU generations. The problem was not the power of the GPU or the memory performance (unlike their CPUs) instead it was the basic architecture that hurt AMD. The problem is that most code is not written to take advantage of the streamlined GPU structure that AMD was using. Because of this when you ran most compute operations you were really only getting 20-25% of the available graphics cores to work on your problem. AMD has made some drastic changes to the new line up and we hope to see these bring them back into the game with nVidia for both graphics and compute. After all if AMD is no longer going to compete with Intel head-to-head at least keep up the competition with nVidia.

In other AMD news it appears that an AMD press slide has leaked. We found this over at OBR-Hardware.com. If it is real things look pretty impressive on paper.

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