Monday, December 3rd 2012
AMD Pushes Radeon HD 8000 "Sea Islands" Launch to 2Q-2013
According to industry sources, AMD pushed launch of its next-generation Radeon HD 8000 "Sea Islands" family of GPUs to the second quarter of 2013 (April-June). The delay comes in the wake of the company going through reorganization within its ranks, in response to poor market performance in Q3-2012. The company originally planned to launch its GPUs before the end of 2012. NVIDIA plans to launch a refreshed lineup of Kepler GPUs in 2013.
Source:
DigiTimes
29 Comments on AMD Pushes Radeon HD 8000 "Sea Islands" Launch to 2Q-2013
I bet they did, given how overpriced the Gfx card market is these days...
an hd 8850\70 might not be bad if it doubles what i have for no more than 200\250€
As a real economic strategy (other than boost Xmas sales) this is not clever. ANY product launch to make AMD more competitive should be brought forward not pushed back. I worry about the competence of the people at the top that think "reorganising" is a priority over business development. Typical "administrators" at the top, not leaders.
AMD & Nvidia should be working on the next major architecture that should come out 2014 rather than working on refresh at list like that we will get better hardware that has matured.
First, I’d say AMD has the current market covered on $/performance and AMD doesn’t see themselves slipping any in sales to Nvidia, so milking it isn't a problem. I think both AMD/Nvidia would like to give both Volcanic Islands and Maxwell GPU’s more breathing room. AMD knows Nvidia won't be moving with their Kepler refresh of cards till more July-Aug 2013, or is there any firm timeline on those? I think AMD didn't like that there was such a gap for Nvidia and Kepler, they want to close that. Sure I’d (AMD) would want to be first and they will, but I don't see them wanting to give the competitor again the opportunity to completely juggle their product line-up as they start seeing all my cards. Next I think AMD also wants to pressure Nvidia to either release the GK110 card prior, and be able to figure out how best to juggle their top offering; or see if Nvidia will hide it till after the Venus XTX release. Either way that will say a bunch about what is Nvidias' level of confidence for that part. Next I think AMD can take such time to again find driver optimizations for their new GNC architecture which is still a learning curve for them.
I'd say for AMD this has less to do with reorganization, although it has a lot to do with in terms of manpower. So if needing to really execute why rush... Is Nvidia showing any signs of being on-time or ahead of the curve this time? Good for AMD take the 3 months, collect a good war-chest of silicon, fully vetted drivers, and wait till they see the "green of their eyes!"
8970 vs GK110, let's go!
@Casecutter
Might it be a case of:
1.maximizing ROI for AMD -the bottom line now seems "cut-to-the-bone". Selling off your assets and shitcanning your workforce seems as odds with the Gunfight at the OK Corral scenario you envisage for AMD and Nv. And;
2. Both AMD and Nvidia would likely see the next round of cards as the final one before moving to 20nm. I'd think that both would try to squeeze out of 28nm what they can, just in case the 20nm ramp isn't overly smooth (afaia, TSMC's tooling is only just now being validated, and TSMC haven't announced a volume production date). And early launch for Sea Islands and a late launch for HD-over-9000 might make for some dismal quarters between the two.
At this stage, I don't think AMD or Nvidia would be overly unhappy with their respective hardware -both seem to have executed reasonably well. AMD's biggest problem is not getting the hardware out, but supporting/marketing the product in strength before and after it hits the channel- and that has less to do with Nvidia than it does AMD's own competency.
Keep up the GREAT work ATi :cool:
Enough said I think.
I was sooooo expecting a January launch though, I'm disappointed :(
Especially with my card.
The problem is certain currently played DX9 games are showing flickers and artifacts more and more while they brag about fps increase.
DX10-11 titles shows no sign of corruption.
EDIT:-
The new BETA 11 drivers with CAP 2 appear to have resolved the corruption I had been seeing in Skyrim.
So there has been significant progress.