I realize that VR-News already has a story on this, but I thought the title they gave it was slightly confusing and not eye-catching enough. And since this is huge news, it deserves to be known.
AMD originally wanted a brand-new architecture (the first since Radeon HD 2000 series) on TSMC's 32-nm node, and it was codenamed "Northern Islands." Then they hit a snag: TSMC cancelled their 32-nm, instead deciding to go straight to 28-nm in 2011. At this point, a new family codename called "Souther Islands" came about; apparently it was still 40-nm, and would be a more efficient version of "Evergreen" (Radeon HD 5000 series).
This is not true. The upcoming Radeon HD 6000 series IS "Northern Islands" and IS a brand-new architecture. After the 32-nm process was cancelled, AMD moved "Northern Islands" back to the 40-nm node (obviously it probably lost a few shader/texture/pixel units to what AMD had planned for 32-nm), and also started work on "Southern Islands." The "Southern Islands" family will be a 28-nm die-shrink of "Northern Islands" and will most likely be manufactured at Globalfoundries (though it could still be TSMC, or even both).
The end point to take away is that the Radeon HD 6000 series is a new architecture, and that more than helps explains some of these insane early benchmarks that have been floating around. Die sizes are said to be about 10-15% bigger across the board, but the performance also looks to be 60%+ higher in some cases; more than a fair tradeoff. It's time to get excited for new GPUs again.
