2012-12-21-126

[Rumour] HD 5800 series shortage causing delays

Six weeks on, and ATI Radeon HD 5850 and 5870 cars are still facingavailability issues. TSMC and AMD just cannot ship enough Cypressproducts to meet the runaway demand. As a direct result, as we expected,the HD 5800 shortage is causing delays in ATI's release schedule.

Of course, the product most affected is Hemlock or HD 5900 series.Rumoured to be releasing late-October, now Hemlock seems delayed tolate-November. The reason is simple - if AMD were struggling to put out asingle Cypress die, what are the chances that they will have enough fora dual Cypress product?

The other product directly affected is the HD 5870 Eyefinity Edition. Rumoured to release shortly after the standard HD 5870, the Eyefinity edition is expected to hit stores in November.

Meanwhile, in the notebook arena, ATI's Manhattan launches are now pushed back to Q1 2010. Manhattan is rumoured to be branded as ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series. Commonsense would suggest Manhattan would be directly based on the 40nm Evergreen series, though confusion has been caused by AMD's latest roadmap, which seemingly lists Manhattan as a 32nm DX10.1 family. It could be a simple typographical error, of course.

AMD claims the company is positioned to supply orders to meet consumer demand. That is certainly not happening now, though we can expect the situation to improve by the end of this month.

In the Nvidia side of things - the much delayed 40nm GT21x shrinks are finally hitting market in October/November. What are the chances of seeing a 3 billion transistor GF100 in quantities on the same 40nm process? Perhaps this is why skeptics suggest we can't expect retail availability of Nvidia's Fermi products before March 2010; though contrary rumours are still gunning for a December launch, which appears more unlikely as each day goes by with no word from Nvidia.

Reference: Digitimes