Hard launch?
There's seldom a dull moment in the semiconductor industry. When they're not all suing each other they like to play silly buggers over launch dates and today is a classic example of that.
AMD had planned to launch the ATI Radeon HD 4890 GPU on 9 April. Then it apparently decided things were sufficiently advanced to bring the launch date forward by a week, notifying HEXUS of this change by Wednesday of last week.
Meanwhile NVIDIA had originally planned to launch its GeForce GTX 275, which is targeted at pretty much the identical segment of the market as the HD 4890, on 13 April. Then, last Friday, it unexpectedly moved the date to today too. Spooky coincidence eh?
Now there's nothing wrong with what NVIDIA has done - as long as there's stock available on launch day. If it's just a ‘soft launch' - i.e. the product is announced but you can't buy it yet - then it deserves to be exposed as a cynical piece of deception intended solely to disrupt a competitor's launch. If it's a legitimate hard launch, however, then fair enough.
So to get to the bottom of the situation we had a ring around the channel to see how much stock there is around.