Suarez™ Posted September 5, 2016 Posted September 5, 2016 Last March, AMD unveiled a roadmap for its GPUs that predicted a one-two punch. Polaris would arrive in mid-2016, while Vega, the company’s big GPU follow-up, would slip in at the end of the year. This arrangement meant that AMD and Nvidia would effectively launch on different cycles, with Nvidia doing a typical top-down refresh, while AMD went with an unusual midrange cycle first. When AMD revealed these plans in March, it was actually a modified launch plan from what the company had told reviewers to expect. At its Sonoma event in December 2015, AMD implied it would launch a larger variant of Polaris first, followed by a brand-new architecture, Vega, later in the year. Those plans had changed by March, with Fat Polaris vanishing off the roadmap and Vega pulling in. Now, according to AMD’s own investor presentations, these plans have changed. Here’s the thing about product launch timing. When a company only gives a vague date like “H1” or “H2,” it almost always means the product will launch towards the rear of the relevant window. AMD repeatedly stated it would launch Polaris in H1 2016 and it debuted the card in late June — just before H1 turns into H2. Companies typically flip to half-years as opposed to quarterly targets when they don’t want to admit a new product is farther away than investors or consumers might like. “H1” sounds like “Q1” and offers hope for an earlier debut, while “Q2” forces the company to admit that a product won’t debut until at least April of the following year. I want to stress that these naming conventions are typical, not absolute. Maybe AMD is being conservative. Maybe they’re planning to debut the card earlier than expected and tweak Nvidia’s nose. But historically, when AMD says “H1,” they mean “May / June timeframe.” Other companies use the phrase similarly. If Vega has really been pushed back to May or June, it’s a serious blow to AMD’s graphics strategy. A six-month delay between Nvidia and AMD’s refresh cycles was acceptable, a year-long delay is not. Vega was supposed to be AMD’s chance to catch up to Nvidia by delivering a top-end GPU refresh that could match Pascal in terms of overall performance and power efficiency. By the time Vega actually sees the light of day, Nvidia will be well at work on their own follow-up. The only silver lining in all of this is that GPU sales are actually a comparatively small part of AMD’s profits and Polaris’ midrange position should still help them sell hardware at important mass-market price points.
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