During its Q1 reports for fiscal year 2017 (which saw AMD's stock tumbling about, even if this Q1 only considers a single Ryzen sales-month on its accounts), AMD CEO Lisa Su referred that AMD's high-performance Vega architecture is still on track for a Q2 2017 release. The words, specifically, are these: "AMD's "Vega" GPU architecture is on track to launch in Q2, and has been designed from scratch to address the most data- and visually-intensive next-generation workloads with key architecture advancements including: a differentiated memory subsystem, next-generation geometry pipeline, new compute engine, and a new pixel engine."

So yes, AMD confirms what we suspected. This leaves a launch time-frame for Vega products until, at most, the end of June. Confirmation after confirmation, it's still a long time to wait, if you'll ask me, with little to no information in the last few months. But it's better than nothing, and I'd much prefer a real launch with retail availability than a glorified paper launch. Here's hoping Vega answers our questions and our needs. It's been a long time coming already.

Via Facebook, AMD has confirmed that Vega is nearly here - at least, as nearly here as a "this quarter" can be. This means Vega will launch in two-months time (Q2 extends through the months of April, May and June, after all.) Through a post on its Facebook page, AMD replied that Vega will be coming "when it's ready... And it will be this quarter."

According to previous leaks (and our own deep dive on Vega's architecture), Vega should go a long way towards bridging the power/performance gap between AMD and NVIDIA's GeForce series. It will be the first time since Fury that AMD will have a competitive, high-performance graphics design (expectedly, and hopefully, since no-one likes to buy over-priced graphics cards.) The fact that AMD has teased Vega in two different pieces of media that come out in May (Arkane Studios' Prey, which comes out on May 5th, and Alien: Covenant, which also comes out during the month of May.) I've previously posited that AMD wouldn't tease Vega's launch alongside one of the most promising games of the year without giving us the chance to power it through Vega come launch day, but as Prey's release date approaches and there is no more information on Vega (much less an announcement), it's looking increasingly likely that we'll have to wait until we can see that universe in all of its Vega-rendered glory.

Intel's upcoming Coffee Lake architecture, which is now all but confirmed to have been pulled forward by the company in an attempt to staunch the bleeding incurred from AMD's recently launched, table-turning Ryzen processors, has reared its head in SiSoftware. In some benchmarks, what is identified as a 6-core, 6-thread CPU from Intel surface, with a clockspeed @ 3.5 GHz, 1.5 MB L2 cache (256 Kb per core) and 9 MB L3 cache. This L3 cache is quite puzzling, considering how Intel's Kaby Lake architecture features 2 MB of L3 cache per core. If Coffee Lake were to keep most of Kaby Lake's design - which it will - then this chip should feature something along the lines of 12 MB L3 cache. The reduced amount of cache seems to scream at a disabled chip, but this could also be a case of a reporting error.

According to a report from Chinese website MyDrivers, NVIDIA is looking to spruce things up on its line-up with a much earlier than expected Q3 Volta Launch. Remember that Volta was expected, according to NVIDIA's own road-maps, to launch around early 2018. The report indicates that NVIDIA's Volta products - apparently to be marketed as the GeForce 20-series - will see an early launch due to market demands, and NVIDIA's intention to further increase pricing of its products through a new-generation launch.

These stand, for now, as only rumors (and not the first time they've surfaced at that), but paint a pretty interesting picture, nonetheless. Like Intel with its Coffee Lake series, pushing a product launch to earlier than expected has consequences: production, logistics, infrastructure, product roadmaps, and stock of existing previous-generation products must all be taken into account. And with NVIDIA just recently having introduced its performance-champions GTX 1080 Ti and Titan Xp graphics cards, all of this seems a trigger pull too early - especially when taking into account the competition landscape in high-performance graphics, which is akin to a single green-colored banner poised atop the Himalayas. And NVIDIA must not forget the fact that AMD could be pulling a black swan off its engineering department with Vega, like it did with its Ryzen series of CPUs.

AMD is on a roll with product launches lately, having just pushed out what is probably the most significant update in mainstream CPUs in years: the Ryzen 5 line of desktop processors. You can look over TPU's review of the 1500X and 1600X here and here. AMD is looking towards powering another central part of your desktop processor, though, with the impending launch of the RX 500 line of GPUs.

Confirmed as rebrands of previous-generation Polaris 10, the new RX 500 series will carry the new Polaris 20 XTX and Polaris 20 XL chips, which are expected to feature higher clocks (in the range of 1300-1400 MHz) from AIBs, before your own overclocking. PowerColor has officially confirmed the launch date as April 18th through social media with a tease for their new Red Devil graphics card. Now if only we could see Vega on this new horizon...

So, it would appear that rumors and leaks about the RX 500 series being simple rebrands of AMD's RX 400 line were true. Recent leaks point to no more changes and performance increases than those achieved through higher base clock speeds on the graphics cards' GPU and memory. The architecture is the same, and the process seems to have followed the same path - as of yet, no confirmation regarding whether or not these cards do use a newer, leaner LPP process for higher clocks and less power consumption.

We've previously covered how AMD's RX 500 series is to be a rebrand of the company's successful RX 400 series. Previous reports pegged the RX 500 series' launch on April 11th; now, it would seem that there has been a slight, one-week delay on the launch date, with it having been pushed back to April 18th. Apparently, this delay is looking to allow more time to "fine-tune the drivers".

The RX 500 series are purportedly straight rebrands from equivalent RX 400 series GPUs (RX 580 will be a rebrand of the RX 480, and so on down the ladder). The need for driver fine-tuning seems a little baffling considering these straight rebrands, but may have more to do with the reported Polaris 12 chips that are expected for launch than any other metric. Remember, RX 500 chips are expected to carry somewhat higher clock-speeds than their RX 400 originals, with some improved power/performance ratio being derived from improvements in foundry processes. But if the rebranding scheme holds up, don't expect these to bring in any meaningful changes towards these cards' performance. AMD is hoping Polaris tides them over through the mainstream market until it can introduce its Vega-based, high-performance GPUs, which are heralded to mark AMD's return to the high-performance consumer graphics segment in a while. Fingers crossed.Source: Thanks @TheMailMan78

AMD's Ryzen launch may have been marred only by some unrealistic expectations on what is really an excellent all-around chip, which apparently prompted some knee-jerk pre-order cancelations and a stock tumble for AMD. However, it would seem AMD built-up enough momentum with its Ryzen launch so as to provoke some shortages in major retailers, despite the company announcing a million-strong launch stock for Ryzen.

All in all, Amazon and Fry's have no more stock of any Ryzen 7 processor and Newegg, which was supposed to carry boxed versions of the processor, is only selling it as part of a number of pre-built rigs. Demand has been higher than supply when it comes to Ryzen ever since AMD opened pre-orders for its prodigal child. Let's hope these are sorted out, and that AMD can feed the consumers' hunger for a long-time coming viable (as in, mesmerizingly great) alternative to Intel.

I should break down the bad news first: we here at TechPowerUp won't be able to provide you with a timely, straight-from-the-oven Ryzen review. Like some other publications, our Ryzen review sample failed to arrive on time. And trust us - we did will it to do so as much as we could, risking a Stranger-Things-esque nosebleed. Alas, to no avail.

The good news is that while we won't be able to offer you our own review of AMD and Jim Kellers' latest high-performance x86 brainchild, we will still strive to bring you meaningful coverage on it. This article aims to make an overall aggregation on review consensus, benchmarks and capabilities of the newest AMD CPU. Trying to add something, we'll also try and evaluate whether AMD learned - or didn't learn - something from its Bulldozer launch fiasco, in a pure marketing perspective. This will justify the editorialized nature of this article, but only after we dive straight to the numbers. Without further ado, follow on to the numbers.

AMD did it again: building-up such a tremendous speed on its new products' hype train that the Ryzen 7 1700X, Ryzen 7 1800X, and Ryzen 7 1700 managed to jump straight to first, second, and fourth spots of Amazon's list of best-selling CPUs, respectively, dethroning even Intel's mighty i7 7700K. Granted, it isn't hard for the processors from one or the other manufacturer to quickly jump and wrangle about the spots on retailer's best seller lists - there Are only two manufacturers of consumer-grade, high-performance x86 CPUs. But keep in mind: this is a pre-order we're talking about, with nothing but leaks and marketing maneuvering for consumers to base their purchase on.

NVIDIA's GeForce.com website today was updated to greet us with a curious-looking countdown to evening, February 28. The countdown goes with the caption "It's Almost Time," with "Ti" in bold lettering. This just about confirms launch of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, NVIDIA's next high-end graphics card based on the same "GP102" silicon as the TITAN X Pascal. It remains to be seen if the company endows the SKU with more CUDA cores than the TITAN X Pascal, or less. A lot will depend on what NVIDIA's product managers learned about AMD's upcoming Radeon Vega.

CORSAIR, one of the most renowned manufacturers of PC hardware, has recently announced the first in what is expected to be a new line of products: a fully-assembled, ready-to-run PC.

CORSAIR developed a new case for their ONE system, taking in cues from their previously-launched Carbide 330R and Obsidian 550D cases, though there is some increased attention to detail and blue accents in this ONE case. The top and bottom have a finned structure reminiscent of a large heatsink, while the side panels are perforated with triangular ventilation holes. Apparently, no windowed side-panel was used, which is slightly at odds with the industry-approved "gamer" aesthetic, which CORSAIR seems to have nevertheless strived to achieve. The tower seems unable to accommodate full-sized ATX boards, though that isn't necessarily a requirement for a high-end system. The Corsair ONE features an HDMI port on the front in addition to the usual USB, which is probably there to service VR headsets.

Pricing and availability for the Corsair ONE have not been announced, which isn't that strange, considering no specifications were announced either. Expect to hear more from this one in the coming months.

As TPU has reported before, some versions of AMD's RX 460 graphics cards were able to be unlocked to their full configuration with a simple BIOS update. This raised some questions as to why AMD didn't initially launch the RX 460 as such, increasing their competitiveness against rival NVIDIA's offerings, but now, it seems at least one of AMD's AIB partners has decided to take action in releasing a fully unlocked Polaris 11 GPU.

Marketed as the Sapphire Radeon RX 460 Nitro OC, this is the first officially launched retail version of the full, unlocked Polaris 11 chip, with all of its stream processors unlocked, for a grand total of 1024 SPs against the usual, and much more meager, 896. This brings the card's peak theoretical throughput at 2.56 TFLOPs (versus the base 2.2 TFLOPs on the 896 SP version), while keeping the card's 75 W TDP.

According to WCCFTech, AMD's next-generation Vega architecture of graphics cards will see its launch on consumer graphics solutions by May 2017. The website claims AMD will have Vega GPUs available in several SKUs, based on at least two different chips: Vega 10, the high-end part with apparently stupendous performance, and a lower-performance part, Vega 11, which is expected to succeed Polaris 10 in AMD's product-stack, offering slightly higher performance at vastly better performance/Watt. WCCFTech also point out that AMD may also show a dual-chip Vega 10×2 based card at the event, though they say it may only be available at a later date.

With AMD's Ryzen chips launch being ever closer to us, details about its product line - which still remain mysterious enough - eventually begin to slip. Reportedly, AMD's entry-level Ryzen chips - the SR3 line of processors, if previous leaks ring true, will be made up of 4-core processors with AMD's SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading), the equivalent to Intel's HT (Hyper-Threading) disabled. These will be, apparently, true 4-core processors, without any additional logical processors exposed by SMT.

It would appear as if AMD has seemingly (and not purposely) given us some lights as to when their hotly anticipated Ryzen chips will hit the wild - and some of our wallets. While they haven't specifically given an exact date, the talk to be given by AMD at the annual Game Developer Conference (GDC) reads: "Join AMD Game Engineering team members for an introduction to the recently-launched AMD Ryzen CPU followed by advanced optimization topics". The "recently-launched tidbit is the most important, since it places Ryzen's launch necessarily before the end of GDC - which will happen between February 27th and March 3rd. AMD has, in the meantime, altered the original headline by cutting the "recently launched" tidbit altogether.