AMD is slowly but steadily to release of its next-generation Radeon HD 7000 graphics cards as reports suggest the company has already started mass production of these GPUs which are fabricated using TSMC advanced 28nm technology.

The official launch of these chips is expected to happen in the first quarter of 2012, according to DigiTimes, the same source that revealed the graphics cores have entered mass production.

If this report turns out to be true, then AMD won't be able to deliver on its promise of releasing the first Southern Islands parts by the end of this year.

The main problem faced by the Sunnyvale-based chip maker seems to be TSMC's inability to improve the yields of its 28nm fabrication process.

Furthermore, the foundry just started volume production of chips based on the 28nm node at the start of this week.

From the leaks that made it to the Web in the last couple of months, we know that AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 7000 graphics card series will be comprised of low- and mid-range solutions based on the VLIW4 architecture introduced with the Radeon HD 6900 GPU series as well as from high-end solutions in the HD 7900 range.

The latter series will use the Next Generation Core (NGC) architecture that we have covered in a series of previous articles. The key aspect of this architecture is that it will improve the performance and functionality of GPGPU computing.

In addition to the new architecture, AMD has reveled a couple of weeks ago, that Tahiti GPUs will use a new cooling system that replaces the usual vapor chambers with a more advanced technology based on a liquid chamber design.

We can't wait :)