Two laptops touting the AMD's as-yet-unreleased HD7000 series graphics of chips have been listed in sales brochures and driver download sites, according to German website PC Games Hardware .
According to the site, the chips have been listed as part of the specification in the forthcoming ASUS' X53TK and a new 17inch HP Envy. The ASUS features an HD7670M to supplement its Fusion processor, while the HP has the higher performing Mobility Radeon HD 7690M on board.
Neither company, nor AMD, have commented on the story, and the parts remain officially unannounced. Drivers are available for download from HP's site, though.
The important thing is that while there's not a lot to choose between AMD and NVIDIA graphics on the desktop at the moment, when it comes to laptops mid-range Mobility Radeon cards have been performing far better for the price recently – even though they've been strangely difficult to find on sale. The X53TX
Sadly, as far as we know, this is unlikely to be the first outing for AMD's forthcoming GPU architecture that it's calling Graphics Core Next (GCN - also known as Southern Islands). GCN has a completely new internal design to the one which AMD has used (with modifications) since the launch of DirectX 10. While the entire HD7000 series of GPUs was originally planned to be based on GCN, recently leaked slides suggest that only the top end HD7900s will use it, leaving most of the range as a die shrink to 28nm of the existing designs.
Or could it? There's plenty of rumours flying around about GCN and its ilk - as well as suggestion of a prelaunch event some time this week.
