AMD Radeon RX Vega launch event delayed until late July - HBM2 to blame?

So this is quite a bummer for all enthusiasts who had hoped to hear more about AMD's Radeon RX Vega. It was expected the company would provide more details about the Radeon RX Vega lineup at its Computex press event but that didn't happen.

AMD makes good on its promise to launch the Vega architecture in the first half of this year by shipping out the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition on June 27th. The Frontier Edition is designed for AI workloads and will probably cost a pretty penny. So far, AMD hasn't announced the pricing of the Frontier Edition yet, it's all still a mystery. This isn't the card enthusiasts have longed for but it's understandable the company launches this first as it will be a much higher margin product than the gaming cards.

At the Computex event, AMD showed the Radeon RX Vega running Prey. In combination with the new AMD Threadripper 16-core CPU, two Vega cards in CrossFire delivered 60fps at a 4K resolution. Unfortunately, this one demo was all we got. No news about the specifications.

AMD revealed it has scheduled the Radeon RX Vega launch late July at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. We don't know whether this will be a soft launch or a hard launch, but at this point it would be really humiliating for AMD if they can't get the card on retail shelves by late July.

So what is going on with all the Radeon RX Vega delays? Based on recent rumors, it seems the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is once again the main culprit. This is what plagued the availability of the R9 Fury series and now all signs points to AMD not being able to get enough HBM2 at a decent price to be able to do a high volume launch.

Here's the official statement from AMD:

Following the announcement that the first graphics card based on the "Vega" architecture will be the Radeon™ Vega Frontier Edition, a premier solution for both machine learning and advanced visualization, AMD announced that this powerful new graphics card is expected to arrive on shelf on June 27th, 2017. In addition, AMD showcased the highly-anticipated Radeon™ RX Vega graphics card, asserting that the "Vega" architecture based gaming powerhouse is expected to launch at SIGGRAPH 2017, the world's largest and most influential conference for computer graphics and interactive techniques, hosted in Los Angeles, California.