jmke

It looks like ATI pulled a big coup over Nvidia with its Radeon 4890 - the card now launches two weeks ahead of its competitor, GeForce GTX 275. According to our sources, ATI decided to start second quarter of this year with a bang, and in a bid to achieve good sales results in Q2'09, the cards will be selling from the first days of April onwards.

Originally, rumors stated that the product is going to launch on April 9th, but that proved to be incorrect after ATI decided to push the launch forward, sending its partners into chaos. We spoke with several partners and the most often heard comment was "a bit of chaos". But, what's done is done: AMD shipped around 40.000 graphics cards for the launch, which is a regular figure cited for a global launch. Usually, this would be followed by a shortage in week two or three, and second batch of cards will arrive close to the end of first month... but this time around, ATI is opening access to GPUs at launch too, so manufacturers can do their own custom designs. Incredible how a single word - "recession" - can force companies to completely change their previous policies... it seems that ATI of yesterday, company that didn't want to release 4850 and 4870 chips to manufacturers in order to keep the sales of their own parts up - is long gone. New AMD don't care for manufacturing, they care for market share alone. And this is what makes AMD a very dangerous player.

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...april-2nd.aspx

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