In a world where shortages on expensive products persists despite the economic slowdown, it may be good to know that AMD may be trying to avoid this with its Radeon RX 7900-series. At least, the company is prepping some 200,000 Radeon RX 7900-series graphics cars for the mid-December launch, according to Kyle Bennett, our colleague of HardOCP fame who now happens to be a good leaker on Twitter.
Apparently, there are "over 200,000" of AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XT and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards set to be available on launch day, which is just a couple of days away: December 13. The 200,000 number presumably includes 'over' 30,000 reference built-by-AMD cards, according to Kyle. These graphics cards should become some of the best graphics cards once they are available.
Depending on the model breakdown, there's over $2 billion in hardware just waiting to be sold, given the MSRPs and potential volume spread. "Verified from multiple sources," Kyle Bennett said. "amdradeon will ship over 200K 7900 XT and XTX GPUs in Q4. Over 30K reference cards on shelves on launch day."
Now, some may wonder whether 200,000 graphics cards units mean anything to the market. The industry typically sells around 10 million discrete desktop graphics cards per quarter, according to Jon Peddie Research (though it dropped to around 7 million mark in the third quarter), and millions more standalone GPUs go to notebooks.
Assuming that the information about 200,000 on the launch day is correct, then a from a per-quarter point of view, 200K units does not sound like a lot. Meanwhile, AMD's Radeon RX 7900-sereies are ultra high-end products and are priced accordingly. They are hoping to be bought on day 1 as well, which is what Kyle is talking about.
Keeping in mind that we are dealing with graphics cards that start at $899 and $999 minimum, we may presume that we are talking about a ~$2 billion worth stock here. After the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 launches, which have both been routinely sold out and/or selling at higher prices, we'll have to see how AMD's new cards fare in comparison.
Will there be enough units for everyone that wants one on launch day? Time will tell. And there's not much time left to wait! The official launch is on Tuesday morning, December 13. Check back soon for our full review and we'll see just how well AMD's RX 7900-series parts stack up to the competition.
