AMD Readies “Sea Islands” Family of Graphics Processors.

The recent firings from Advanced Micro Devices apparently reduced not only marketing and PR personnel, but also engineers. Fired in November, 2011, a hardware designer from AMD has disclosed the code-name of the company’s next-generation of graphics processors – Sea Islands – over at his profile in LinkedIn social network.

Alexander Shternshain, a former MTS design engineer at AMD, who is looking for a new job now, has unveiled the name of AMD’s future graphics processors: Sea Islands.

The new family will likely emerge in 2012 or in 2013 and will be most probably be made using 28nm fabrication process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. According to VR-Zone web-site, Sea Islands name “directly refers to the chain of islands on the USA's Atlantic coast”.

Based on his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Shternshain was involved in design of the latest AMD families of graphic processors starting with Evergreen and Northern Islands (Radeon HD) GPU families, Fusion APUs (Ontario, Llano, Krishna), and the Southern Islands and Sea Islands GPU families.
Actual specifications or peculiarities of the Sea Islands product family remain unknown.

What is natural to expect is further development of GCN [graphics core next] architecture with the addition of multimedia-related features, gneral purpose computing and graphics performance improvements. The Sea Islands lineup will likely continue to belong to DirectX 11.1 generation of GPUs.
AMD did not comment on the news-story.