AMD Navi will reportedly be ‘delayed’ until Q4, 2019. According to unnamed sources close to French PC hardware site, Cowcotland, the launch of the (assumed) mainstream 7nm graphics card generation has been pushed from Q2 all the way back to October at the very earliest.
Talking to a couple of industry sources at Computex last year, our understanding was that AMD hoped to have Navi out the door by the end of Q1. However, our sources thought that unrealistic, instead expecting a launch window of Q2 to be more likely. Similarly, further rumours pegged an E3 Navi announcement in June, with on shelf availability following in July. That’s also around when we expect AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen to launch.
But even that conservative release window may no longer be the case. While AMD’s CPU roadmap has remained rocksteady for a couple of years, we’re not so sure the Radeon GPU business enjoys such assurance. But while it’s not surprising that AMD may be delaying the launch of its next-generation mainstream card until October, these sources are completely unsubstantiated.
This most recent turning of the rumour mill is tenuous at best, all falling on a single, unsourced line in a story claiming the October launch date. No board partner would break cover and risk Lisa Su’s wrath, however, and so these vague rumours are likely the best we’ll get until the AMD Navi launch starts gearing up proper.
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“In gaming, we will launch our high end Radeon 7 GPU in February,” Lisa Su says (via Seeking Alpha), “followed by our next generation Navi GPUs later in the year.”+
So whether it’s June 1st or December 31st, AMD is confident that its 7nm GPUs, set to replace the Polaris architecture and compete with Nvidia’s still unconfirmed GTX 1660 Ti, will be in your rig before the year’s out.