While Nvidia is taking their own sweet time to launch their full lineup of DirectX 11-equipped GPUs to all segments of the market, AMD, which has got itself a nice 6-month head start in the game, is not taking any vacation to celebrate the great victory. As AMD has pretty much stuffed each and every market segments with their DirectX 11 cards and chips, they’re readying their next big thing for launch well within this year if there’s no hiccups.

Just as the Radeon HD 5000 series GPU family was codenamed Evergreen with its members under the Evergreen trees names (like Cypress, Juniper, Redwood, Cedar), the Radeon HD 6000 has been given the codename “Southern Islands”, with its infants named after islands in the Caribbean (not to be mistaken with the Mediterranean).

“Bart” (after Saint Barthélemy Island) is the codename for the performance/upper-mid segment GPU, a successor to the “Juniper” Radeon HD 5700 series. “Cayman” (after Cayman Islands) is the enthusiast GPU, successor to Cypress, and will go into making SKUs that succeed the Radeon HD 5800 series. Finally, the king of the hill is codenamed “Antilles” (after Antilles Islands) will be the dual-GPU SKU that makes use of two Cayman GPUs, successor to the beast Radeon HD 5970 “Hemlock”. AMD partners will be in a position to sell graphics cards based on these by November 2010. The Radeon HD 6970 “Antilles” should be out by December 2010. The lower-half of the family will most likely release next year.

Now what should we expect from the upcoming islands? Basically applying the ‘Tick-Tock’ philosophy from Intel, The Southern Islands will be manufactured under the 32nm process, shrinks from the Evergreen trees’ 40nm build. A smaller process would directly translate to cooler chips with smaller die, and since it’s smaller, ATI would have no problem drilling up the speeds since heat has been reduced. Not much else has been revealed, besides having UVD 3.0 (Unified Video Decoder). Current UVD stands at version 2.2. The Unified Video Decoder, previously called Universal Video Decoder or UVD in short, is the video decoding unit from ATI Technologies to support hardware decode of H.264 and VC-1 video codec standards, and being a part of ATI Avivo HD technology. In layman’s term, UVD is GPU hardware acceleration for H.264 and VC-1, which is used to encode and play your HD videos.

SOURCE via techpowerup