In a leaked presentation meant for its investors, AMD states that it expects to launch the “Vega” GPU architecture no sooner than 2017. The company plans to get it out within the first half of 2017. What makes this decision significant is that the company isn’t planning on making bigger GPUs on its existing “Polaris” architecture, and its biggest product is the $249 Radeon RX 480. This leaves the company’s discrete GPU lineup virtually untended at key price-points above, against NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1070, GTX 1080, and TITAN X Pascal, at least for the next five months.
In the mean time, AMD could launch additional mobile SKUs based on the Polaris 10 and Polaris 11 chips. The reasons behind this slow-crawl could be many – AMD could be turning its chip-design resources to the various semi-custom SoCs it’s working on, for Microsoft and Sony, with their next-generation game consoles; AMD Vega development could also be running in-sync with market availability of HBM2 memory. 2017 promises to be a hectic year for AMD, with launch of not just Vega, but also its “ZEN” CPU architecture, the “Summit Ridge” processor, and APUs based on the CPU micro-architecture.
