Well, ATI has enjoyed an unusually long reign in the graphics market with its Evergreen family of video cards, but it seems that their time has run since rumors state that their next generation GPU's, called Southern Islands, are getting ready to hit the market in November.

Since its launch in September of last year, the DirectX 11 capable Evergreen family of graphics chips had many enthusiasts drooling about its level of performance, but now thing are a bit more difficult for ATI as NVIDIA has released their Fermi DirectX 11 architecture.

Although it hasn't been a smash hit, Fermi has started to win some battles and the GTX 460 has managed to recommend itself as the best choice available at the $200 price point.

Sure, the situation is not that bad for ATI, since the Canadian maker has boasted some really impressive financial results in Q2, but the graphics card market is really competitive and using an architecture for more then one year is something really rare.

But now ATI is ready to move on and according to sources cited by DigiTimes the red team is preparing to launch the Southern Islands architecture in November of this year.

Cited sources come from graphics card manufacturers that say AMD is planning to cut prices for its ATI Radeon HD 5000 series GPUs to defend its market share and to prepare the upcoming Southern Islands launch.

Not many details are known about the future GPU family from ATI, but some leaks suggest the producer expected to use the 32nm manufacturing process for the new chips, but TSMC decided to skip this step and go directly for 28nm.

That decision forced ATI to stay with the 40nm production process in use for the Evergreen family, renaming their future chips from Northern Islands to Southern Islands.

Is really tough to say what are the architectural changes brought by ATI in this new series, but a new tessellation unit is to be expected since NVIDIA's Fermi is doing really well in that regard.

However, considering AMD secrecy, is really hard to speculate at this point about what the future will bring for Southern Islands.

The series will be announced in Octomber, according to the same sources, ATI usually introducing its high end models first and then moving down the line with more affordable models.

So, given ATI's track record, one or two high-end solution are to be expected in November with more to follow soon.

Let's just hope that ATI's future architecture will bring a tangible level of performance so that a new price battle can begin as this will make gaming a whole lot more affordable for everyone. 

We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .