AMD delayed Radeon RX Vega until July?

AMD recently took the wraps off of its Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, a new professional graphics card based on the Vega GPU architecture, sporting 16GB of HBM2 technology. The consumer Radeon RX Vega (RX = consumer) is coming "very soon thereafter" the late-June launch of Radeon Vega Frontier Edition, according to Lisa Su, CEO of AMD.

During the 45th annual J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference, Su said: "We're very excited about Vega. Vega is a brand new architecture and actually has really the world's most advanced memory architecture for GPUs. What we did announce at our analyst day was that the first shipping Vega will be the Frontier Edition which will ship with 16GB of memory and will ship towards the latter half of June. You will see the enthusiast gaming platform, the machine learning platform, the professional graphics platform very soon thereafter. And so we will be launching Vega across all of the market segments over the next couple of months".

Now, let's dissect this statement. Su has said that Radeon Vega Frontier Edition will launch in the "latter half of June" while the "enthusiast gaming platform" will launch "very soon thereafter". Finishing up, Su said that AMD will be "launching Vega across all of the market segments over the next couple of months".

If you remember, I had an exclusive industry source tell me that AMD will only have 16,000 Radeon RX Vega graphics cards for the months proceeding the launch, and it looks like this is becoming more and more true everyday. If AMD had no HBM2 supply issues, we should expect a massive flood of cards - but it looks like we might see a trickle release of Vega SKUs.

So we could expect AMD to launch a GTX 1080 competitor, following it up with a GTX 1080 Ti competitor in RX Vega form. NVIDIA always reveal next-gen GPU architectures with the GTX xx80 SKU first, followed by the GTX xx80 Ti version months after.

AMD will be showcasing Radeon RX Vega on May 31 at Computex, and I'm currently packing my bags and preparing to fly over to Taipei in 48 hours. Exciting times indeed!