AMD will reportedly delay the update of its Radeon series GPUs, with the release of the Radeon HD 8000 series to be scheduled in the second quarter of 2013.

The company had previously planned to release the successor of the Radeon HD 7000 series at the end of 4Q 2012 in order to better compete against Nvidia's products. But AMD's ongoing business reorganization has forced the company to delay the release, sources from the upstream supply chain in Taiwan said, according to Digitimes.com.

AMD Radeon HD 8000 codenamed Sea Islands will be based on the 28nm GCN 2.0 architecture (Graphics Core Next 2.0). The architecture would bring improvements to overall performance per watt and would fuse the latest HSA features.

If we are looking at a Q2 2013 timeframe for Sea Islands Radeon HD 8000 GPUs then we would first of all see the debut of their flagship Venus XTX HD 8970 followed by Venus XT/Pro HD 8950.

Later AMD is expcted to launch the "Mars" and "Oland" based mid-range/performance cards in Q3 2013.

In addition, AMD?s upcoming "Richland" APU which features Piledriver cores would also be equipped with Radeon HD 8000 IGP.

Research and consulting firm Jon Peddie Research (JPR) estimates that Nvidia's desktop and notebook GPU sales grew in Q3'12, while both Intel and AMD saw their shipment slowing down during the quarter. Nvidia has been also gaining in China's discrete graphics card market, while AMD's share has been dropped.

Nvidia is also set to release enhanced version of Kepler GPUs some time in 2013. But Nvidia's interest is also moving to the ARM-based processor market, with the release Tegra 4 (codenamed Wayne) SoC in the first half of 2013. According to unconfirmed information,Nvidia will release four different Tegra 4 models coming in 2013, all using the same architecture as the Tegra 3: quad-core chips with a fifth "companion" core for low-power operations. The Tegra models, clocked at 1.2~2.0 GHz, will be based on ARM Cortex A15 and A9 processors. CES 2013 looks like a good stage for an official release of the Tegra 4 platform.

Another low-power version of the new chip is also expected to be the first SoC to feature built-in LTE and 42Mbps HSPA+ support. It will be most probably codenamed "Grey" and will pack networking technology of Icera. This is expected to appear in the market in the second half of 2013.