So, did anyone catch AMD pulling review samples? Not just from one, but from several review sites?
I thought it was curious, and wished to share these to hear opinions.
Personally, I'm neutral. These last couple of months have been so riddled with rumors that a part of me just does not care anymore. (Just give me the benchmark numbers!) I think that I am partial to siding with AMD, though. When you have reviews like this, who will talk about the how the R9 380, like its Tonga R9 285 predecessor, has less memory and smaller bandwidth, but fail to talk about the the inclusion of lossless color compression and other improvements to help with tessellation and shaders. (Tom's Hardware and Anandtech delved into those details, thankfully.)
Now, to my knowledge, GCN was designed for the long term. Graphics Core Next did not just stand for a clever way to advertise a new architecture, but the new way that AMD was going to handle its upcoming architecture. It was built with modularity and scalability in mind, in relation to several fields. With this information, and as the R9 200-series was rolling out, I figured that the upcoming generations of graphics cards would be GCN-based, but with changes and improvements along the way. I was just starting to get into PC building when the Radeon HD 7970 ("GCN 1.0") smashed onto the seen. Although it is surpassed today, it still is quite relevant. It can handle 1440p gaming, and at 1080p you can still play with high-to-ultra settings. I wasn't surprised when it was rehashed as the R9 280X, and, equally, I am not surprised to see it phased out of the R9 300-series. As newer feature sets are introduced, older ones should be phased out. (That said, I am surprised that the now-named R7 370 managed to make the cut.) TL;DR - I felt that rebrands were going to be apart of the GCN.
The Bulldozer family of processors followed a similar market path. Seems odd that no one really complained about the released of the next iteration, even though Kaveri was the first APU to actually possess GCN for its integrated graphics, which also allowed for HSA.
Anyway, enough babbling from me. Thoughts, feelings?