Stefan Mileschin

AMD has denied fairly credible rumours that it will not be releasing a next generation graphics card family this year.

The rumours that new Radeon 8000s will not hit the shops this year as planned have been gathering momentum and appeared to have been confirmed when Japan's 4Gamer.net released an interview with AMD product manager Devon Nekechuk.

Nekechuk also provided 4Gamer.net with a chart, which indicated that the Radeon 7000 series will be "Stable throughout 2013". Which at the time no one seemed to twig that the Radeon HD 7000 and 8000 series could both be available at retail at the same time. The slide only covered the third quarter.

AMD also made matters worse by retweeting a link to the article calling it the 2013 GPU roadmap. Just a few days prior, AMD marketing manager Robert Hallock took to the @AMDRadeon account to tell a follower that "The HD 7000 Series will remain our primary focus for quite some time".

To be fair all this countered other rumours that 8000 range would be in the shops in the middle of the year, which also seemed pretty credible. That is the thing about rumours.

PCWorld was told by a much amused AMD representative that the company will certainly have new GPU products this year and there were plans to shed light on its 2013 plans for the Radeon brand later this week.

The AMD representative suggested that the 4Gamer article was taken out of context, and said the company will be clarifying its 2013 strategy for the Radeon brand in a conference call.

While many believed that it did not make much sense for AMD to waste much needed cash on a product launch, the release of the 8000 series later in the year is logical. The company always has problems at the end of the year and having a solid product launch could help.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/amd-de...s-card-rumours