mighty, i can answer you (yeesh everyone is so hostile)
so you're eager for amd rumors, but how come not for nv rumors? meaning, you accepted what jen said at computex without cross checking the rumors & context, of course he needs to assure press & especially shareholders, it's risky for a company to persuade people to wait until next gen instead of buying now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
1) rumors that contained the words 'ampere' & 'turing' started early in the year
2a) a new consumer gen is every two years, all the people complaining about having pascal 'for so long' are making up nonsense, what kind of blind stupidity doesnt notice... 2006 tesla1, 2008 tesla2, 2010 fermi, 2012 kepler, 2014 maxwell, 2016 pascal, 2018 turing
2b) a new consumer gen is ~Q2/Q3: june 2008 tesla2, march/april 2010 fermi, march 2012 kepler, september 2014 (big) maxwell, may 2016 pascal, september/october 2018 turing
3a) news reports of surplus pascal inventory a few months ago were appearing, extremely likely due to a reduction of people mining, more people buying used or just not buying up farms of cards (it takes months for manufacturing to adjust, so december/january everyone had pressure to decide what to do, that mining buble was quite a lot more massive than the previous summer one, but then that stock takes time to show up physically around the world)
3b) i saw someone ask what happened to maxwell when pascal launched, the convo may have been specific to 980ti, but apparently nv requested the inventory (not sure if chips that partners later assemble or fully built cards) to be returned to them instead of letting partners keep them (probably they could use them for rma or to give low prices to stores for example)
3c) news reports said nv asked partners to eat the cost of pascal inventory rather than how maxwell ended, this is around the time that a new gen would normally launch so logistical decisions need to be made, even if there's no competition, they 'need' to be steady (dont forget their stock price, they probably dont want it to deflate after the 2015-2017 boost, same for amd really)
4) the word for canadian distributors is that 1080ti & maybe 1080 stock is disappearing, this doesnt mean stores are sold out yet, it means stores cant order more stock, but this makes me wonder about that big typhoon in mid september
5) holidays are coming, games launch a bit before holidays, nv needs to find a balance between ending pascal & end of year, i wonder if they're also trying to get in before intel's 9 series so people are more eager to spend (if nv launches after, i presume people will think more than twice about the high rtx pricing after they spent at least a few hundred on new cpus)
6) directx ray tracing seems to require the new windows update, i know there arent exactly any games, but it would be poor to end users (including developers/artists) to have cards+drivers without OS support, they wouldnt even be able to start their own personal experiments in their own game engines with the gameworks sdk or whatever the workflow is
7) the 2080ti is the one that keeps getting shipping delays, i feel like this might be related to the typhoon even though someone on reddit emailed jen & got a more detailed reply from some other manager that mentioned some missing info in their supply chain, but i suppose it might not be typhoon since 2080 is not getting delays, dont forget the recent highest end ti models normally launch half a year later instead of at the same time, i think 2080 is on time & maybe they rushed 2080ti because 2080 is 'the same' as 1080ti, they really needed some halo next gen 4k numbers (2080ti is indeed quite powerful)
8) one of the replies here mentioned tension inside amd, there is a wccf (bleh i know) article that says similar
https://wccftech.com/exclusive-amd-navi-gpu-roadmap-cost-zen/ how amd is trying to go for more pro/server/custom in order to survive better, it's understandable given how dangerously low stock & high debt they were a few years ago, i expect raja had his grand dreams unable to get funded or risked, it's not like raja hasnt left amd before
https://www.anandtech.com/show/6907/the-king-is-back-raja-koduri-leaves-apple-returns-to-amd
9) i actually missed or didnt remember what david wang said the first time, but after checking some news from the summer, he said 'wants' to release 'a new gpu' per year, it may not be gaming or at least this year may not be the first year
10) [note: i didnt watch the video yet] a polaris refresh extremely likely has to be 12nm glofo not 7nm/14nm/16nm tsmc, not only due to how many others are trying to use tsmc, but that unfortunate wafer agreement amd has, i hope something changed now that glofo is canceling 7nm...
the timing seems a bit awkward though, linux kernel drivers are not something to extrapolate from (intel has updates for its late 2019+ parts starting this past 2018 summer), i think i saw someone say the device id is old, we can always double check when original vega/polaris/fiji/tonga/gcn updates happened to see past timing anyway
the game bundle promo ends at the start of november, one one hand we could think that's to clear old stock for a refresh, on the other it could mean no new cards this year
videocardz hasnt mentioned anything about a refresh, they usually try to do a good job with rumors by not blindly posting all, attempting to ask around or analyze first
navi has commonly been thought to be ~Q2 2019, it seems to make more sense to have a polaris refresh be closer to navi, especially if navi wont be across everything (i/we dont know, or navi is Q3/Q4 2019 & a refresh is needed)
what would be refreshed anyway? there are multiple polaris chips, yet people only think of or want a 680 without a 660 or 650? the performance gap from 560 to 570 is already way too large & has been since 460 to 470
long post... i hope you can now see all the angles, maybe i can call this 'skeptically eager', we cant just accept all rumors & we cant literally interpret press statements, i'm still leaning towards what i've been expecting, but it's indeed possible that the plans from early this year have changed due to the very unexpected glofo change, intel's multitrack drifting, & nv acting like apple way more than usual for some reason (to people that get real spiteful real fast, the bf5 scandal is way overblown & being used for multiple excuses)
in the end we just have to wait so this was all a waste (unless you're trying to buy this season), we could at least stop being so immature in the meantime
