14 DAY TRIAL // Some people no doubt hoped that the next series of add-in graphics cards from Advanced Micro Devices would be launched in the first half of 2013, perhaps around the same time as the Richland APU series, but the company roadmap has revealed otherwise.
Advanced Micro Devices hasn't actually released the details of its roadmap, but that didn't stop 4Gamer website from posting it.
From what the Power Point slides show, the Radeon HD 7000 series will be “stable throughout 2013.”
That means that, while the Radeon HD8000 will make their appearance before the year is out, they won't really have a marketing impact until 2014.
More specifically, the first Radeon HD 8000 video adapter will be unleashed in the fourth quarter of 2013, in time for the holidays.
This is quite a contrast to the plans for, say, the Richland accelerated processing unit line, which will debut on March 19.
It is also interesting to note that, while the desktop collection will take so long, the mobile series of HD 8000M GPUs will arrive much sooner.
The so-called “Solar System” series (Radeon HD 8500M, 8600M and 8700M GPUs), based on GCN (graphics core next architecture), will arrive in the second quarter, probably during Computex 2013 (a trade show happening in Taipei, Taiwan, in June).
Moving forward, AMD will rely heavily on the Never Settle game bundles and the comparison between the Radeon HD 7000 and NVIDIA GeForce 600 cards.
The Sunnyvale company has repeatedly drawn attention to the superior performance of its lineup while selling for less than rival cards.
On a related note, Advanced Micro Devices is making a 28nm GPU for game consoles and will carry out major “Global Scale” advertising campaigns throughout the year, to make sure customers don't feel abandoned or forgotten between now and Q4, when the long-awaited product release takes place.
