AMD's Radeon VII could launch with fewer than 5000 stock

TweakTown has reported that fewer than 5000 Radeon VII GPUs will be hitting the shelves come launch day, mid summer this year. According to its source, AMD will be making a net loss on each GPU sold to the consumer, as these are effectively just redeveloped M150 GPU accelerators originally designed for enterprise and data center use. The latter of which was announced and launched on the tail end of last year.

Due to the lack of availability TweakTown's source suggest that if true, there’s likely to be a lack of aftermarket variants as well from other manufacturers.

We reached out to AMD for comment and it stated that: "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". 

AMD saying that it has AIB partners in tow clearly refutes TweakTown's report, so we'll be holding our breath on this one. On top of that, 5K units for the initial product launch/first run is a fairly standard business practice worldwide, typically with bigger batches to follow. If it is the case that Radeon VII is limited to only 5,000 samples, providing long-term driver support for the cards, wouldn't make a whole lot of financial sense.

AMD’s announcement of its world first, commercially available, 7nm gaming GPU left a lot of us underwhelmed. Although the card can be quite competitive in some titles, versus its Nvidia RTX 2080 adversary (check out our full report here), it certainly wasn’t the announcement we were all hoping for, aka the arrival of Navi.

Zak Storey

As Associate Editor of Tom's Hardware's prestigous British division, Zak specializes in system building, case reviews and peripherals, and has a particular penchant for liquid-cooling. He's also a lover of all things Viking/Scandinavian (thus the poor attempt at a beard).

  • jimmysmitty
    Great. That means retailers will most likely price gouge and help lower the value of the GPU.
    Reply
  • redgarl
    ^^

    It is sold directly on AMD website. You can avoid retailers if you really want it.
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    21680710 said:
    ^^

    It is sold directly on AMD website. You can avoid retailers if you really want it.

    This will be sold out fast, they always are. Its a good thing there isn't a mining craze currently as last time they launched a new GPU with one they sold out in less than a day due to miners buying them up faster than most people could get them.

    Not blaming AMD, they can only do what they can do. I blame retailers taking advantage of it.
    Reply
  • bigdragon
    21680710 said:
    ^^

    It is sold directly on AMD website. You can avoid retailers if you really want it.
    So gamers get a fraction of a second to buy before the bots snap them all up. Awesome!
    Reply
  • mikewinddale
    "According to its source, AMD will be making a net loss on each GPU sold to the consumer"

    As an economist, this statement offends me. If AMD were truly making a loss on the sale, they wouldn't sell them. The fact that AMD is selling the M150 as a Radeon VII must mean that AMD expects to make more net revenue than if they didn't do that. So that's a gain, not a loss.

    Now, maybe AMD is making a loss compared to the cost of production. But the cost of production is irrelevant. See: sunk cost fallacy.

    Prospectively, all that matters is opportunity cost or marginal cost. Assuming that a product has already been produced or an investment has already been made, then the historical cost is irrelevant. All that matters is going forward, whether the revenue from an additional sale exceeds the cost of an additional sale.

    E.g., if you invested $1 billion in R&D for a new GPU that fails to sell well, your historic investment is irrelevant. All that matters is whether the revenue from selling one more GPU exceeds the electricity and silicon and whatnot that it takes to make that GPU for sale.
    Reply
  • alextheblue
    21681860 said:
    "According to its source, AMD will be making a net loss on each GPU sold to the consumer"

    As an economist, this statement offends me. If AMD were truly making a loss on the sale, they wouldn't sell them. The fact that AMD is selling the M150 as a Radeon VII must mean that AMD expects to make more net revenue than if they didn't do that. So that's a gain, not a loss.

    Now, maybe AMD is making a loss compared to the cost of production. But the cost of production is irrelevant. See: sunk cost fallacy.

    Prospectively, all that matters is opportunity cost or marginal cost. Assuming that a product has already been produced or an investment has already been made, then the historical cost is irrelevant. All that matters is going forward, whether the revenue from an additional sale exceeds the cost of an additional sale.

    E.g., if you invested $1 billion in R&D for a new GPU that fails to sell well, your historic investment is irrelevant. All that matters is whether the revenue from selling one more GPU exceeds the electricity and silicon and whatnot that it takes to make that GPU for sale.
    Yeah I'm looking at a couple of TH news articles by their fresh meat and I'm thinking... yikes. This article needs a rumor tag until they can cough up a real source. As you implied the design was paid for when they put together a Vega 20 based Instinct, if they were losing money they would just sell them as a cheaper variant Instinct for $1000 instead of a gaming card.

    Then you've got gems like "AMD Radeon VII Will Ship Without Double-Precision" which is just hilarious.

    it certainly wasn’t the announcement we were all hoping for, aka the arrival of Navi.
    Were you expecting a Navi card this soon? I was pretty sure mid-2019 was the going rumor, and I'm not sure if that will include a consumer variant or if that will be later in the year.
    Reply
  • Lucky_SLS
    And here I was speculating Navi would only arrive with the next gen consoles from the Sony and Microsoft aka 2020. Cuz Navi was designed for it...
    Reply