AMD is planning a Trinity refresh in 1H/2013, and Kaveri will be a tad later than most expect. This isn’t necessarily a delay or change, just something that wasn’t exactly made clear before.
Update: 8/6/13 – fixed 1H/2012 typo to 1H/2013.
Update 2: 8/6/12 – The above was meant as a joke.
If you are thinking this is a Brazos 2.0-like version of Trinity, call it Trinity 2.0, that is basically the idea. While the exact changes to the chip are not exactly clear, a new stepping, a few hundred MHz, and a few less watts seem likely prospects. Contrary to public mis-perception, there is nothing wrong with Trinity as it stands, the desktop version was pushed out to move older Llano stock, nothing more.
Being a late Q1 or early Q2 update leaves Kaveri for 2H/2013, something that SemiAccurate has been hearing was the schedule for a while now. The update to Trinity pretty much nails down Kaveri as later 2013, not the usual late spring release like v1.0 and Llano before that.
One has to wonder if this schedule was tweaked a bit to play catch-up with Haswell and its massive GPU, or the intended plan from day one. As long as Kaveri is shipping to OEMs by fall/back to school build time in 2013, no problem. If it is delayed past that, AMD has the proverbial issues to deal with. More as we get it.S|A