Stefan Mileschin

The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn which claims that AMD cannot be bothered releasing its next-generation graphics chip this year.

So far, AMD has not made an official statement but the organisation is leaking more than a Welsh nationalist leak wine tasting club.

According to various sources it looks like there will not be any GCN 2.0 GPU to head up the Radeon HD 8000 family. This release date was only a rumour in itself, but it is based on a pattern that Chimpzilla has followed for nearly six years.

Ever since the HD 3000 range, which appeared in November 2007, each new generation appeared nine to 13 months later. The HD 4000 series was in the shops in June 2008, the HD 5000 products launched in September 2009, the HD 6000's in October 2010, and the HD 7000 family in January, 2011.

Based on that idea everyone would have expected to see a nice shiny HD 8000 GPU within the next few months. To make it look even more likely AMD recently refreshed its mobile product lines with HD 8000M hardware, replacing some old 40nm parts with new 28nm GPUs based on GCN.

AMD is already shipping "HD 8000" cards to OEMs, but these are not exactly new generation cards. Basically they are HD 7000 cards with new model numbers with 7000 crossed out and 8000 written over the top in crayon. The RAM, TDP, core counts, and architectural features are all identical to the HD 7000.

It is starting to look less likely that AMD will field a true second-generation Graphics Core Next processor before the end of 2013. This is because AMD does not seem particularly focused on getting new graphics cards to market. At the moment the company seems more interested in getting chips into consoles such as the Wii U. It's believed to have designed the CPU and GPU for the Xbox Durango and possibly both of those components for the PS4 as well.

It is also focused on launching the 28nm successor to Brazos, codenamed Kabini, in the first half of this year. All these are far more important than putting out a new generation GPU.

Kaveri will appear in late-2013 and it'll be the first desktop APU with a GCN-derived APU. Getting this lot to market will take a lot of AMD's marketing dosh.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/amd-de...graphics-chips