Rumors suggest that AMD will delay for the next year the launch of its brand new architecture called Vega.

Extreme Tech reports that AMD unveiled last March a roadmap for its GPUs, predicting that Polaris would arrive in mid-2016, while Vega would be launched at the end of the year. Now, AMD seems to change those plans.

According to leaked slides from an investor presentation, the release quarter for the upcoming Vega GPU has been pretty much confirmed by AMD itself. The Vega architecture will be introduced on the market in the first half of 2017.

According to the website lazygamer.net, this effectively means that for quite some time AMD's Radeon Technologies Group will not have any new presence in the budget GPU price range under $300. This also means Nvidia GTX GPUs will be relatively unchallenged on the market for at least the next four months - if not even longer in case that AMD release its upcoming Vega GPUs later into 2017. However, an eventual release date pushed to May or June would negatively affect AMD's graphics strategy.

Tech experts speculate that Computex 2017 would be the optimal time for AMD to release its Vega architecture graphics cards. Another high possibility is that AMD might even release its upcoming GPUs in March 2017, at GDC.

It is possible that the slow release schedule is part of AMD's strategy to appeal to more mobile and budget solutions in its aim to recover some market share. Another possible reason for AMD's slow release schedule is the company's focus on allocating more of their resources towards its semi-custom business, such as chips for their updated consoles to release next year as well as for customers such as Sony and Microsoft.

Since the HBM2 memory may be far too new for any mass release in 2016, the availability for new memory standard is another factor to take into consideration in setting the pace for developments regarding Vega.