Damn, this really really sucks. I'm becoming more and more depressed about AMDs lack of execution this year.
AMD never had desktop HD8000 on its official roadmap. They only said they are launching Sea Islands, which was specifically HD8000
M. You cannot delay a product that was never announced. This is not the same as Piledriver or Kaveri which were on the roadmap.
Yeah I get it, that they are financially strapped, but not releasing any new products at all, is not exactly the brightest way to make any cash, in a highly competitive environment.
NV's GTX700 is also rumored to be postponed to Q4 2013.
"Both AMD’s “Sea Islands” 8000 Series and NVIDIA’s 700 Series have apparently been pushed back all the way to the fourth quarter of 2013 according to SweClockers."
I think really it's the same competitive market that HD7000 has had to compete with GTX600 for the last 12 months. Titan changes little in the grand scheme this since $900 GPUs do not directly compete with $100-500 SKUs. AMD is investing heavily into game bundles instead of launching new GPUs. It's a different strategy and
it costs $$$. Looking at Newegg, HD7950-7970 are starting to go out of stock, which means the Never Settle Reloaded bundle is creating some new interest from consumers. It's way cheaper to do a game bundle to increase sales than to launch a brand new GPU series in what is historically a usually slow Q1 for GPU sales. When HD7000 series launched in Q1 2012, they didn't really sell well. Most PC gamers do not upgrade in Q1.
With the reference HD7970GE drawing 238W at TPU in Crysis 2, there isn't much wiggle room to launch a much faster HD8970. Perhaps they are redesigning the chip around Pitcairn XT since that's a much more lean gaming chip. Perhaps they are waiting for 20nm node to launch the next series in Q4 2013/Q1 2014. Perhaps they could be occupied with fulfilling contracts for Sony/MS. One key rumour floating around that AMD was no longer just licensing their tech to Sony/MS, but actually delivering the chips and collecting royalties per each chip sold. For this reason there is an expected revenue stream that will occupy 20-40% of AMD's Revenue from these "Licensed tech" by Q4 2013. Normally if you only license the tech, you cannot make that much $ without selling the actual chips. If AMD has to deliver the chips for PS4/Xbox 720, that's a huge amount of responsibility. Perhaps they are waiting to rewrite the memory management of GCN before launching HD8000. Also, since GK114 is nowhere near launch, there is no rush to replace HD7000 as that series already has class leading price/performance at nearly every price level on the desktop. Where AMD needs to make the biggest push is mobile dGPU segment since this is where they lost the most market share due to not being aggressive enough with design wins.
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