Confirming rumors, today confirmed that it will be releasing new Radeon desktop GPUs not earlier than until late in the year.
The company plans to focus on the Radeon 7000 series cards currently available on the market for the first half of 2013, AMD told journalists during a conference call.
Before the release of the next-gen Radeon 8000 series graphics cards, AMD will release some updated 7000-series GPUs at least in the first half of the year.
AMD claims that their current Radeon 7000 series has GPU leadership over Nvidia's GTX GeForce 600 series in terms of performance.
"With sales volumes continuing to ramp, it would be premature to launch a new series," officials said.
However, it seems that AMD's ongoing business reorganization has forced the company to delay the release.
AMD has been trying to attract gamers with the release of its "Never Settle" offer, which launched toward the end of last year and bundles several top gaming titles with AMD's Radeon-brand graphics cards.
"We aren't afraid," says Roy Taylor, AMD's director of global channel sales. "We have new products. We have a roadmap. We are not sitting still, we do not lack resources, and we do not lack imagination. Let me be clear: The new products will be a new architecture."
Taylor was also asked about the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan graphics card, which is a rumored to be based on Nvidia's powerful Tesla K20 offering.
"We'll wait and see what Nvidia comes back with, and when it arrives we'll deal with it, but we believe we'll maintain leadership. I'm a firm believer in bringing back the old GPU wars. We're taking them on again," Taylor said.
AMD Radeon HD 8000 codenamed 'Sea Islands' will be based on the 28nm GCN 2.0 architecture (Graphics Core Next 2.0). The architecture would bring improvements to overall performance per watt and would fuse the latest HSA features.
AMD's flagship model will be the 'Venus XTX HD 8970' followed by 'Venus XT/Pro HD 8950'. Later AMD is expcted to launch the "Mars" and "Oland" based mid-range/performance cards.