A quiet before a coming storm, the third quarter proved to be a virtual stalemate in the Nvidia vs. AMD war, with the latter managing just a one point gain in unit share. By contrast, Q4’09 promises to be anything but quiet. AMD’s got a brand new set of graphics cards ready for the holiday (and Windows 7) season. Its launch of the Evergreen (Radeon HD 5000 series) generation has equipped the company with strong offerings for the Enthusiast and Performance segments, ready to entice somewhat-more-optimistic consumers.

"The design is sound. It's just a matter of trying to get TSMC to a point where they can yield. They're feeling the manufacturing crunch," said Davis. "We're a little bitter under yield but we're working back into a manufacturing schedule we want for these parts. TSMC can only kick them out so fast at this point."

AMD's 40nm ATI Radeon HD 5000 series and 55nm ATI Radeon HD 4000 series GPUs are currently both facing shortages; the former due low yields on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC's) 40nm process and the later due to AMD's conservative attitude towards its 55nm GPU sales after the launch of 40nm products, the sources noted.

AMD released a new generation of Radeon HD5000 series of graphics cards, in addition to the first to provide support for DX11, there is the biggest highlight Eyefinity technology, for the first time graphics output interface from the two-headed extended to three or even six, AMD claims that Eyefinity technology, the output image has gone beyond the human eye resolution limit, can be for gamers or professionals to provide the perfect display of the program.

If ATI plays it safe it will develop the chip for both TSMC and Globalfoundries and will benchmark which of the two gets the job done better. AMD is yet to announce that it will officially do its GPUs in Dresden bulk part of factory, but this is something that won’t surprise many people.