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AMD Next-Gen Graphics May Slip To End of 2013
MojoKid writes "AMD has yet to make an official statement on this topic, but several unofficial remarks and leaks point in the same direction. Contrary to rumor, there won't be a new GCN 2.0 GPU out this spring to head up the Radeon HD 8000 family. This breaks with a pattern AMD has followed for nearly six years. AMD recently refreshed its mobile product lines with HD 8000M hardware, replacing some old 40nm parts with new 28nm GPUs based on GCN (Graphics Core Next). In desktop, it's a different story. AMD is already shipping 'Radeon HD 8000' cards to OEMs, but these cards are based on HD 7000 cores with new model numbers. RAM, TDP, core counts, and architectural features are all identical to the HD 7000 lineup. GPU rebadges are nothing new, but this is the first time in at least six years that AMD has rebadged the top end of a product line. Obviously any delay in a cutthroat market against Nvidia is a non-optimal situation, but consider the problem from AMD's point of view. We know AMD built the GPU inside Wii U. It's also widely rumored to have designed the CPU and GPU for the Xbox Durango and possibly both of those components for the PS4 as well. It's possible, if not likely, that the company has opted to focus on the technologies most vital to its survival over the next 12 months."
Maybe the Free GNU/Linux drivers will be ready at launch after all.
Do we really need more powerful GPUs? What we need is a better way of displaying graphics and a better toolkit to do it.
Whatever happened to the Unlimited Detail guys?
...Steve
I have a Southern Island card that will likely never have a usable open source graphics driver so I am never buying AMD again. I can get way better video from Intel Integrated graphics and those nice Intel open source drivers than I can from a 6 core AMD proc with a SI card. I am done with AMD.
...if it means those of us with Radeon HD 5000 through 8000 series GPU's get a little more life before AMD arbitrarily labels them "legacy" so that they can stop paying their engineers to develop drivers for them (like they recently did with the HD 2000 through 4000 series)... :p
AMD announced today that they would have a message clarifying this. Apparently these rumors are not all true.
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
Looks like NVIDIA will continue to be able to charge a ridiculous premium for their 680M because the AMD equivalent performs all over the place in games that the drivers haven't been specifically written for.
So, what I'm hearing is that AMD will be releasing its new line of video cards right around Christmas season, when a lot of people get new systems anyway? I've never understood why nVidia and ATI release their first cards around spring. Sure, get the bugs out early I guess, and there's got to be a bunch of young kids who have summer jobs willing to put all their profit towards a new gaming rig, but I still find it hard to believe that it isn't more profitable to just release the cards around October-ish, maybe even in September so you can still cash in on all the kids who just finished up their summer jobs.
If they really do get that boost in sales from the new console generation, and take this extra time to put forth more powerful competition towards nVidia, this may actually turn things around for AMD. Now, if they would finally release some decent Linux drivers, I may be sold
AMD has definitively said that they will not be releasing 8000 series GPUs this quarter, or possibly not even this year.... No need for "several unofficial remarks"....
I was really looking forward to selling my HD 6990 with a waterblock for enough to offset the cost of a new [or a couple new] 8xxx series card(s) but now it doesn't look so promising. Dangit, dagnabbit, GRRRR.... cry..... I was GOING to ebay it for about 550 bucks for the combo [well worth it] which means a new one would have only cost me about 300 bucks or so minus the water block. Now it's going to be about a hundred less and that really does suck.
I live in Austin. The only thing that AMD is know for around here is layoffs. I'm surprised they have any engineers left to work on their products. Why anyone would work for them is a mystery to me.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
AMD uses TSMC for its stand-alone GPUs, as does Nvidia. TSMC has been having the greatest difficulty making these very complex chips. Meanwhile, other foundries, like GF, are making great strides in chip technology.
Nvidia and AMD have the choice of going for another round of parts on the same process at TSMC, with only modest improvements at best, or waiting for a 'shrink'. Neither AMD or Nvidia feel much market pressure at this time, since their high-end parts are already way too powerful for all the current computer games. Both companies also harvest semi-working dies, and use them for graphics cards of lower performance. These 'harvested' parts are already like new chips in the market.
The new consoles hitting the market from Sony and Microsoft around Autumn time will change the situation. While the consoles have GPU hardware significantly slower than the best PC products from AMD/Nvidia, console game companies will at last unleash a new generation of very advanced games, providing an incentive once again to own a powerful gaming PC.
It should be noted that both new consoles have a massive 8GB of RAM, and the trend for future games is open-world- massive seem-less environments. Open-world games are very amenable to render-quality 'sliders', allowing the owners of the most powerful hardware to view the same game in much improved quality. The new consoles mean the PC will never again have AAA exclusive titles, but the ported games will be from two platforms that are both very PC like in design and ambition.
Powerful PC GPU hardware will set far render distances, high textures, better shadows and lighting, higher framerates, and larger resolutions. These better settings will suck up all the surplus GPU power AMD and Nvidia can offer the games over the next 4+ years, until stagnation hits again.
That approach is old hat now. Modern games don't have far clip planes anymore, but render everything to "infinity". Objects just become less distinct with distance, same as in real life.
Guild Wars 2 is a typical example of an MMO with a modern rendering engine. You can stand on a high mountain pass and see everything to arbitrary distances, and objects don't suddenly "pop" into view as you approach like in the bad old days. The technology doesn't even need hot PC machinery --- even an old Core 2 Duo and a positively antique nVidia 9800GT give you a useable framerate.
Game graphics have really advanced a lot in recent years.
Rumors don't *slip*, announced schedules slip.
1.) publicly traded company B starts a rumor that publicly traded Company A is going to release a product on date X.
Company A never said that at all, but hey, that's what rumors are- no one knows who started it. *shrugs*.
2.)When Company A does not release on date X, company B then goes on a stealth PR offensive that Company A is *slipping*. Guileless reporters trying to make this week's word count repeat the story about company A *slipping* which is picked up and repeated in social media....
3.) Company B ---> Profit.
The thing is, the above scenario is actually *illegal* since actually against the law to spread false rumors about a company for the purpose of manipulating their stock price.
Now if we only had regulators who weren't caught in a revolving door somewhere. ...
When asked, executives from AMD have been unable to explain why employees at their headquarters keep altering the Wikipedia page for the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.
Cool, I must have distant relatives in the AMD headquarters, embarrassed about the event! John Paul II did forgive him, though, for his mental instabilities.
The delay of the HD8000 is a positive thing when considering the arrival dates of the Kaveri APU. This way the customer is able to pair the APU with the current technology.
AMD have also recently said they have no ability nor plans to compete with Intel on high end desktop processors either. Their top-of-the-line FX8350 is only modest competition for Intel's midrange.
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