AMD CEO Dirk Meyer confirmed the release of the company's second-generation DX11 GPUs next week. AMD's executive also said that users would see AMD chips in tablets in a few years.
AMD's CEO made the announcements during a conference call on the company's third-quarter financial results.
"We will be launching our second-generation DX11 graphics offerings next week," he said. "We'll be introducing our second-generation of DX11 technology into the market with some launch activities actually next week. We'll be shipping all the family members of that product line I'll call it, by the end of this quarter, and total volume think in terms of several hundred thousand, or hundreds of thousands of units," he added.
AMD's highly anticipated refresh of the Radeon HD 5000 series, the Radeon HD 6xxx series, will be shipping in time for the holiday season. According to some recent spec leaks, the new cards promise to offer a healthy bump in performance. However, the GPUs will be reportedly made using TSMC's 40nm process and not more the advanced 32nm process as it was initially expected.
After months of denying any interest, CEO Dirk Meyer also said during the same conference call that AMD would finally release chips for tablets "in a few years."
The tablet strategy is important for AMD in the long term, but for now, the company will wait and observe the market, Meyer said.
Device makers may take AMD's netbook components and build them into tablets, he said. These could include the upcoming low-power Ontario chip (CPU + GPU), which will start shipping in the fourth quarter. Ontario's CPU core, code-named Bobcat, will be able to draw less than 1 Watt of power.