Nearly here?
The ATI Radeon 4870 X2 was launched yesterday and became the new fastest single graphics card (albeit with two GPUs) available. But that last word has to be qualified as, at time of writing, the product seems to still be unavailable at 99 percent of respected etailers.
We spoke to AMD's head of product and platform marketing EMEAI, Ian McNaughton, yesterday and he told us: "We have shipped parts to all our tier one distributors and etailers." He couldn't speculate about what happens to the stock once it's out of AMD's hands.
One distie we know to be a key AMD/ATI partner is Realtime; we spoke to purchasing director Julie Darrington. "We received a significant number yesterday and they all went out on allocation," she said.
When we asked why she thought there were so few available online, she said: "It can be difficult for etailers to get set up and ready to go live without all the information." It seems the channel doesn't get information any earlier than us journalists do.
We also asked Darrington what she thought of this launch. "This is another great card from AMD and it proves they're back," she said. "We expect to see good things from them for a while."
Our feeling is that it should be a matter of hours, rather than days or weeks until we start to see more widespread availability of the 4870 X2.