AMD confirms Vega still on track for Q2 2017

AMD held its quarterly earnings report, during which CEO Lisa Su revealed a few details about launch plans for the first half of 2017. Firstly, she confirmed to investors that the first Ryzen desktop processor will be launching in early March as previously thought, but secondly, we also got confirmation that the first Vega-based graphics cards are still on track to launch during Q2.

Vega is set to be the next big launch for AMD during the first half of 2017, following Ryzen by a couple of months. Speaking during the earnings call, Su said: “I think we have Ryzen launching in early March and then we’ll have Vega, our enthusiast GPU launching in the second quarter. We should see Ryzen doing very well in the high-end, as well as Vega and by nature, since both of those high-end markets are markets that we don’t have significant presence today, there will be an opportunity to both gain share as well as increase attach rates in those markets.”

News that Vega is still coming in Q2 is reassuring, it also lines up with the news that SK Hynix was ready to make HBM2 available this quarter. This gives AMD plenty of time to start mass producing Vega GPUs with HBM2 on-board.

Vega is set to be AMD’s next high-end graphics card architecture, with the goal of taking on the GTX 1080 (or possibly 1080Ti if it ever releases), judging by some of the leaked benchmarks it will be in a good position to do just that.