AMD's General Manager of Graphics Teases Next Generation of Radeon Graphics Cards

The lowdown on AMD's next enthusiast GPU

Sometime in the near future, AMD will hold a press event to spill the beans on its next generation Radeon graphics card series. In the meantime, we're left to speculate what the Sunnyvale chip designer has up its sleeve, and much of the speculation has pointed to a die shrink to 20nm. As it turns out, however, AMD has no such plans to pursue 20nm GPUs in the immediate future.

Forbes sat down for a spell with Matt Skynner, general manager of AMD's graphics business, to discuss a number of topics, including what the company's plans are for its next Radeon cards. First and foremost, Skynner said the new parts will debut sometime in the fourth quarter of 2013.

Skynner wasn't able to share a price point, though he did say AMD isn't targeting the $999 range for a single GPU solution, as AMD doesn't believe a lot of people have that kind of money to spend on a graphics card.

"We normally address what we call the ultra-enthusiast segment with a dual-GPU offering like the 7990," Skynner said. "So this next generation line is targeting more of the enthusiast market versus the ultra enthusiast one."

Skynner also said that the GPU will be built on a 28nm manufacturing process, not 20nmm. At 28nm, AMD feels there's still room to squeeze out higher clockspeeds and higher "absolute performance," so it doesn't make sense to go 20nm at this point.