What is the latest on AMD’s Sea Islands (CI) line of GPUs? The short story is not much, it is pretty ho-hum.
Sea Islands is not going to be a 2012 product, it is looking like a March 2013 release for now. Things could of course change, but that is unlikely given what the card is. CI is a 28nm evolution of the current 7xxx line of cards, think optimizations rather than massively new features.
As far as performance goes, AMD was promising AIBs roughly a 30% speed boost from the new silicon a few months back. That we hear is fairly optimistic, with more measured sources saying +15% is more likely. AMD is power bound and die size equals cost, so what you are looking at is process improvements and algorithm optimizations rather than any new big bangs.S|A
