AMD Says Radeon VII Video Card Supply Will Meet Demand

In Response to Rumours of Limited Quantity at Launch

Rumours have popped (via Tweaktown) up claiming that AMD only has less than 5,000 Radeon VII video cards ready for launch. However, AMD has issued a statement in response.

“While we don’t report on production numbers externally, we will have products available via AIB partners and AMD.com at launch of Feb. 7, and we expect Radeon VII supply to meet demand from gamers”

The hopeful phrase there is for “supply to meet demand”, which is ambiguous enough that it could mean two different things. Either AMD does indeed only have 5,000 video cards on hand for sale but they expect that only 5,000 will buy it. Or that they have more than that since they expect it to sell well.

How Plausible is the Lack of Radeon VII Supply Rumour?

Looking at it strictly from the hardware perspective, it might be true due to 7nm manufacturing coupled with costly HBM2 use. High-Bandwidth memory is of course, much costlier than GDDR6.

Even NVIDIA is offering GDDR5 variants for their new RTX 2060 to lower their GDDR6 cost further. The original TweakTown article actually suggest that AMD is losing money in offering the Radeon VII with 16GB of HBM2 for $699.

Which makes sense since they are basically re-purposing Radeon Instinct MI50 HPC cards for gaming use by adding output ports. And with the FP64 (double-precision floating-point) disabled.

The Radeon VII will go on sale starting February 7th, and AMD will also be selling them directly in limited quantities via their website.