Yes they have.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-Radeon-HD-7000-Series-Launch-Delayed-to-2012-Report-222212.shtml
Loads more sites out there with the info, does it matter if its been delayed ? No.
Just gives people more time to save up.
Please show me a quote from AMD in that story, any single quote, firstly Softpedia check nothing and post every single story out there, Nordic hardware post news to get hits, look for NEW stories from tech journalism sites, not sites that just post anything to get hits and post every story everyone else is posting.
This info isn't verified, and whats more the sites that would be under NDA form AMD and Nvidia on any new cards, don't carry the story, thats a big clue, like no real sites carried the Sept 19th Bulldozer story, while all the want to cash in on hits from stupid stories sites all claimed it as the release date.
Fudzilla was still posting Fermi would be out before Xmas in 2009, when
NVIDIA had officially confirmed it was delayed till 2010, and other sites reposted that known to be incorrect story, over and over, because thats what these sites do. I worked for a tech site and know LOADS of guys who work on them, they ALL employ news editors, literally every news site that has a new story will send out links to every other news site, and news editors just throw them up, every tech company will have these sites on a PR release e-mail list, so every single new product gets an e-mail sent to these guys. 99.999% of the information on these sites is either generic PR crap everyone got, or made up bs to get hits. Sites with real journalists are few and far between. You can spot them pretty easily, they usually have original info no one else has, not generic statements of guy x told me thing Y. It will be someone told me X, explained it as Y, has reasonable proof Z, and it ties in with what several other stories and actually makes logical sense.
I thought the latest industry insider rumours were that it's unlikely that there'll be any new high end cards from either AMD or NVIDIA until next summer at the earliest?
Edit: Actually Q2 I think it was, so April or later.
Nope, again, there are sources you can ALMOST trust, there are some you certainly can't trust, pretty much 95% of all sites anywhere in the world simply repost stories, and occasionally add some new piece of bogus info so all the other sites go around reposting it and linking back to them.
Nvidia mid 2012 for high end looks likely, AMD taped out half a year ago, they are ready, manufacturing is all they need.
Now I haven't really been keeping up with all the 7 series news but the cynical part of me (i.e. most of me
) thinks that while the potential may be within the cards and AMD to double the power of the current cards, to release the cards with that much graphical HP at £250-£300 would, IMO, be commercial suicide. While they may have an initial uptake in six months time they'd have nothing to improve and therefore would experience a huge drop in sales coming into Q3 & 4 2012. Even if they could, they won't.
They'll limit the cards capabilities so they're faster than anything current by a decent amount to make people upgrade but the cards will be crippled in some way so there's room for improvement later on so they can tempt people into buying again.
I'm also worried that Bulldozer delays have affected 7k series cards into being delayed as people ahve been moved from graphics into CPU to push Bulldozer out. Time will tell, but the cars won't be this amazing double the graphical HP for the same price some people seem to think it's going to be.
Just completely daft start to finish, firstly, every product ever has selling cycles, thats life in retail, always has been, always will be.
Think about what you said, really carefully, if you only make a card 30% faster, rather than 80% faster........ most people won't actually upgrade anyway. There has only been a couple of generations that haven't been more than 50% faster, most are 70-80% faster, the only generations I can think where this didn't happen was when there were major problems with the process, even then when its on a new process its way faster, its only been when they get stuck on a process.
You're right, if its 80% faster, a lot of people will buy, then sales will slow down, if its only 40% faster, sales will simply start off slower as less people will bother upgrading for only a 40% bump in performance. Commercial suicide, how, they'll be able to make a 6970 performing card, at half the cost AND have another card twice as fast for the same cost.
By your own reasoning 6970 sales will have slowed down because less people want to upgrade. The only way to keep sales going long term is new products every year or two, slowing down the speed increases would be commercial suicide, who would buy their cards then?
As for graphics guys moving to bulldozer, please stop guessing, firstly the 7 series cards have taped out and are only waiting on manufacturing, it taped out 6+ months ago, its ready, theres not much more to do with it except get them back and package them, secondly, the team will NOT have moved a single guy over to Bulldozer, they'll be working hard on the 8970, Bulldozer taped out WELL OVER A YEAR AGO, they don't need to rush guys onto it, most of the engineers at AMD will be working on the 2nd and 3rd gen Bulldozer, the APU after bobcat and Trinity and the gpu guys in the 8970 and 9970.
Bulldozer is waiting on Glofo, 7970/7870 are waiting on TSMC, they'll be out the second they can be.
As for building a card and crippling it to limit performance, why on earth, direct costs for building gpus/cpus/mem any chips are down to die size, building a core thats capable of more then crippling it, when you can build something smaller, lower speed without crippling it, in higher volume, with far higher margins. No one would ever do what you suggested(salvaged parts are a very different situation).
