Tom’s Hardware reports that a source within AMD has indicated that the company may release their upcoming Southern Islands GPU earlier than expected. Previous rumors suggested that AMD would have their performance desktop graphics cards out in the first quarter of 2012 with the lower clocked and mobile processors coming out a bit sooner than that.

If this new information turns out to be true, we may be seeing the high performance desktop graphics cards released in limited quantities of 7000 to 10,000 units in December with a full rollout of the company’s 28nm graphics card lineup in the months following. Specifically, the first cards may be available as soon as December 6th, 2011. It remains to be seen whether or not the lower power cards will still be released before the high performance desktop cards.

Personally, I’m interested to see how AMD’s approach with their Southern Islands GPU will match up against Nvidia’s current and future (more) general purpose computing design. Are you excited for Southern Islands?