AMD's mainstream Radeon RX Vega delayed until 2018?

Computex 2017 - AMD had a tiny little whimper of Radeon RX Vega at Computex this year, revealing that it would detail Radeon RX Vega at Siggraph 2017 - which takes place between July 30 and August 3. For our entire Radeon RX Vega coverage, I have a big article on it here.

But since I'm on the ground in Taipei, I talked with some friends in the industry and we had an interesting discussion to say the least. First off, I exclusively revealed that AMD will have less than 16,000 units of Radeon RX Vega in the months after its launch, and this seems to be something that is forming into a solid fact.

Then there's the fact that AMD promised a Q2 2017 launch of Vega, and while they met it by making Radeon Vega Frontier Edition available on June 27 - that's the professional card, not the consumer RX Vega. On top of that, the enthusiast level cards will launch in Q3 - while the mainstream cards are supposedly being pushed back to Q4 2017 at the earliest, but it could spill into Q1 2018.

Now, this begins to make sense when you think back to my exclusive report that HBM2 yields are very low, and that AMD won't have many Radeon RX Vega graphics cards to sell. So, it begins the question... where to from here?

I think we'll see AMD release their enthusiast Radeon RX Vega with HBM2 in August in very, very low numbers. AMD will most likely unveil 2-3 different cards to compete with varying levels of NVIDIA's absolute onslaught of GeForce GTX 10 series cards, namely the GeForce GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti and TITAN X.

AMD Radeon RX Vega Line Up (My List)

AMD will have up to 7 different Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, as it needs to hit 5 different price points and products from NVIDIA from the GeForce GTX 1070 right up to the GTX 1080 Ti, and even the new TITAN Xp.

• AMD Radeon RX Vega (GTX 1070) - 4GB HBM2, cut down Vega 11 GPU
• AMD Radeon RX Vega (GTX 1080) - 4GB HBM2, cut down Vega 11 GPU
• AMD Radeon RX Vega (GTX 1080 11Gbps) - 8GB HBM2, cut down Vega 10 GPU (slightly higher clocks)
• AMD Radeon RX Vega (GTX 1080 Ti) - 8GB HBM2, full Vega 10 GPU
• AMD Radeon RX Vega (TITAN Xp) - 16GB HBM2, dual full Vega 10 GPUs