If you want to see the truth, take the red pill

Sep 22, 2014 06:40 GMT  ·  By

The whole deal with the red and blue pills from Matrix has been done to death, but that isn't stopping Advanced Micro Devices from using the same figurative device once again. Indeed, the company seems to relish in it, although, granted, it is going with the “no pills required” stance this time, instead of prescribing them.

Obviously, it has to do with the fact that Advanced Micro Devices' logos for graphics products have always been red. A legacy of ATI, the company that AMD assimilated years ago and the one that originally possessed all the IP and brands.

It was an interesting process to see the rivalry between NVIDIA and ATI become a rivalry between NVIDIA and AMD.

That rivalry has come to something of a head now that NVIDIA has formally launched the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 graphics cards.

AMD's response to Maxwell

So far, there hasn't been much of one. While NVIDIA has finally released high-end video cards powered by the Maxwell graphics processing unit architecture, AMD hasn't really responded with a launch of its own.

The only video board it released recently, the Radeon R9 285, won't be followed by any stronger Tonga-based cards like R9 285X. At least that's what all the latest reports have said.

Now, though, we may risk a hope that the Sunnyvale, California-based company will finally unveil some new video board of its own.

Granted, nothing actually says that AMD's product launch will be a GPU, since AMD's teaser makes it a point of keeping things vague.

Still, red is the color of GPUs, while green is that of CPUs. True, APUs have red logos as well (with black), but we're still banking on a graphics card.

Alas, that still leaves the mystery of whether or not the board is a Radeon-branded adapter (and, thus, a consumer graphics card) or if it is a Quadro FirePro (professional adapter).

The time of revelations

According to AMD, its big announcement will come in three days, on September 25, 2014. The presumed graphics card may or may not have a hybrid cooler, which would imply it is a stronger board than normal. Thus, odds are that we're going to be seeing that Radeon R9 390X after all.

It would explain why the GPU, CPU, and APU maker would so casually claim that the Future Is AMD and not be at all intimidated by how often similar statements are made by others on the technology market. I guess you'd all better hold onto your hats.