AMD Caymen Islands cards definitely delayed

AMD HD 6000
AMD Caymen delayed

Top industry-insiders tell TechRadar.com there will be no Caymen GPU launch in November.

When we first got our hands on AMD's new Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 we were pretty nonplussed, but there was always the spectre of the radically re-designed Caymen GPU-powered cards coming straight on their heels.

But according to a top source from within the graphics card industry, AMD looks to be cooling those heels.

We have been told that the delayed AMD boards will be arriving "sometime" in December, not this month after all.

Rumours have been floating around from sources in Taiwan, but this is the first we've heard from industry bods in the know in this country.

We know that none of the board manufacturers have had their allocation of cards shipped yet. And with an end of November deadline, it looked tight as to whether they would turn up at all.

Indeed, it looks like we wont be seeing them until Santa's revving up his reindeers next month.

This is all looking very much like the AMD version of Nvidia's GTX 480 yield-based delays, as another industry bod said yesterday.

And if it does match Nvidia's problems last year are we then looking at a 2011 release instead?

With yesterday's release of the GeForce GTX 580, is AMD holding onto its top-end card to squeeze every last drop of performance out of it? Or is there something drastically wrong with the chip or manufacturing process?

Only time will tell...