June was surely a month of GeForce GTX 700 series. NVIDIA launched three cards in less than 30 days without any actual response from AMD.
If you thought that AMD engineers were on vacation then you are mistaken. Apparently they were working on new GPUs, especially a Hawaii silicon, which is believed to power the upcoming Radeon HD 9970 and HD 9950. Yes, that’s not a typo, AMD will supposedly drop the HD 8000 naming reserved for OEM-parts, and use HD 9000 instead. This was rumored for a long time, but people were not convinced enough to confirmed it. According to my sources this is true, there won’t be any Radeon HD 8970 non-OEM card, which if you think about actually makes sense. Imagine two cards having the same name, but different specs. Maybe now people will stop posting Radeon HD 8970 OEM datasheet as a news about a leaked document directly from AMD site (seriously don’t do that).
According to ChinaDIY, AMD could be preparing its Radeon HD 9000 series for October, which is the launch month for Battlefield 4, a Gaming Evolved title. My information is more optimistic. Unless the roadmap has changed, AMD could show off the new series in September. Some sources even claim it could be the first week of September. Regardless of what month is it going to be, we are two or three months until the new series arrive. Most likely AMD will start with HD 9970, which if the rumors are true will be faster than GeForce GTX 780, but slower than GTX TITAN. However the big question is not the performance, but the price. If the card would cost $550, then we have a clear winner.
The Chinese source also claims that AMD will resurrect the Radeon 9550, only now with the HD-part. Interesting fact is that it’s almost exactly 9 years since the launch of this card.
