Rumour control: Windows 7 expected in 2009, says AMD

Posted at: 11:31am 2nd October 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Presentation at CEATEC could reveal AMD’s plans to introduce 40nm chips next year, along with DirectX 11 GPUs

Windows Vista may have only been around since 2007, but Microsoft may have plans to introduce its successor, Windows 7, in 2009, according to presentation slides apparently shown by AMD at CEATEC (Cutting Edge IT & Electronics Comprehensive Exhibition).

Japanese tech site PC Watch claims to have snapped some shots of AMD’s presentation at the show, which has some interesting slides on display. Of particular note is the slide titled ‘What to expect in 2009’ (pictured), which says that we can expect a move to 40nm chips, as well as the arrival of Windows 7 and DirectX 11, in 2009.

Microsoft has yet to confirm a release date for the new operating system, although Bill Gates famously said that ‘sometime in the next year or so that we'll have a new version,’ when asked about the next version of Windows in April this year. However, Microsoft later backtracked on this, saying that the new OS wouldn’t be available until 2010.

Microsoft has demonstrated Windows 7 with a multi-touch interface, and has also said that it won’t feature email and photo apps as standard, with optional software available for download instead. Meanwhile, DirectX 11 promises a compute shader for GPGPU tasks, as well as a tesselator domain shader . Interestingly, the new API will also be compatible with DirectX 10 hardware.

Meanwhile, the presentation also says that it expects Apple’s OpenCL GPGPU API to be doing the rounds next year, and also expects GDDR5 memory to become more widespread. We’re currently awaiting comment from AMD as to whether this was an official announcement or a leak. Until we have confirmation, this is going to be filed as a rumour.