There has been over a year of rumors leading up to this day but after countless false leads and misplaced rumors, AMD is finally set to launch the first salvo of their Southern Islands architecture. Unlike nearly every series since the days of R600, this isn’t simply another refreshed core layout with a few bits added on for additional functionality. Rather, what we are looking at today is the culmination of lessons learned over the last few generations of DX10 and DX11 parts all looped together within a 4.3 billion transistor die. Think this architecture as AMD’s version of Fermi but without the rampant power consumption; it has been designed from the ground up for class leading performance in compute and DX11 environments. As we saw with Cypress, AMD had some issues achieving optimal results in current generation applications from an architecture that had largely been around since 2006. Cayman changed things around a bit by moving away from VLIW5 and instituting a more efficient VLIW4 core instruction set while including some additional features meant to speed up DX11 rendering. Southern Islands meanwhile kicks the VLIW architecture to the curb once and for all and goes down a path less travelled with a new ground up core redesign called Graphics Core Next. We’ll talk more about the changes in upcoming sections but for the sake of briefness; let’s just say that the differences are significant.