Originally Posted by
SKYMTL
AMD has announced they will be ready on December 13th. To retailers and even most consumers, that's past the "Christmas shopping season" so they're already missing it.
9 working days (not including Christmas Eve) does NOT give retailers enough lead time to guarantee shipping times to and from distribution at what is the busiest time of the year.
Typically, retailers in the garment, electronics, and other comodity markets consider the second week of December to be the cut-off for products coming to market for the Christmas season.
Anything after that would be considered fresh meat for the typical "January Sales" timeframe. That IS NOT something AMD wants to get into with a brand new product(s) because it will instantly devalue it when compared to the marked-down existing products.
We have seen this in the past from other launches from AMD and NVIDIA. The option left open is to paper launch the HD 6900 series in mid-December and begin volume shipments in mid to late January in order to avoid the typical market trends that arise right before and after Christmas.