Radeon VII Availability

[FANGXP]

Hey everyone. Are you able to find the Radeon VII in your regions for the launch price ($699). I can't find a single one. There are pre-built PCs with it but not any separately.

Cheers

[mariushm]

The cards were made in limited quantity and they're gonna keep making them in limited quantity - basically they cost too much to make, and they're only made for AMD to have something to compete with in the high(er) end, until they get Navi launched.

 

 

[Princess Luna]

Considering the Radeon 7 is just defective FirePro cards that were repurposed...

 

Why bother with a card that still lags behind a GTX 1080 Ti while consuming the double of electricity for this pricing? But that's just me personally.

 

Availability is terrible outside the common markets like USA.

[Guest]

[MeatFeastMan]

3 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The cards were made in limited quantity and they're gonna keep making them in limited quantity - basically they cost too much to make, and they're only made for AMD to have something to compete with in the high(er) end, until they get Navi launched.

 

 

What is the point in that though? Surely selling a gpu needs to achieve one of two aims: either to make a profit or to gain market share. If it costs too much to make and it's in limited quantity, then it achieves neither of those things. That would make it completely pointless to sell.

[MeatFeastMan]

1 minute ago, valdyrgramr said:

Well, the card itself doesn't cost that much to make.  It's when you factor in the HBM2 tax.  The HBM2 addition causes the card to cost like 750 USD for AMD.  They're selling them at a loss.  The reason these cards require the HBM2 is more due to the fact that they're literally just repurposed instinct cards.  They're basically designed for people like me who do specific workloads yet game too.  It's a bad value for anyone just gaming especially with the fact that the drivers are holding them back.  HW is there, but the SW just isn't according to some reviewers.  The 2080 is a much better value right now for people just gaming, and some other workloads too.

They MUST be making a profit here otherwise they wouldn't be selling them. I refuse to believe that they would just release a card for no reason whatsoever. None of this makes any sense.

 

The only other thing I can think of is that they weren't able to sell anywhere near enough mi50's and decided to sell it for lower as a sort of damage limitation thing.

[mariushm]

HBM2 memory is still very expensive. When the card was launched, the price for a single 4 GB HBM2 chip was around 80$, so the 16 GB of memory costs at least 300$.

Then you have to put the gpu chip AND the memory chips on an interposer, a simple chip that basically has pretty much only traces connecting the 4 memory chips to the gpu chip - while a basic silicon chip, this interposer still has quite a large surface area (has to be at least as big as the gpu chip plus the 4 memory chips) so it still costs around 10-20$ to make.

 

AMD wanted to launch Navi sooner but they experienced some problems with it and had to make a new revision of the chips - when something like this happens, remaking a chip with significant changes, it takes up to 2-3 months from the moment a chip starts to be made in a factory until the company actually has the chip in their hands, in a form that can be put on a video card, to be tested, to determine the optimum frequencies, voltages, to test various sections of the chips to see if there's errors or not, and all that crap.

So because this Navi thing was delayed, they had to come up with something to compete with against nVidia, which came with RTX series and which also had the GTX 1080 cards beating the RX 580 and RX 590s.

 

So AMD took gpu chips that aren't quite good enough to be sold on Instinct cards (let's say the gpu chips have some errors in some sections that are disabled anyway on Radeon 7), or they're chips that don't achieve the minimal specs to be used on Instinct cards (like for example, just numbers out of my ass, let's say they can't run at 1800 Mhz with just 1.2v voltage and 200 watts, but can run with 1.3v and 230 watts... basically the chips aren't as power efficient as required for the Instinct cards, but good enough for "gamer" cards where gamers won't care about extra power consumption)

 

Because this Navi delay was somewhat unexpected, AMD probably didn't have engineers working on circuit board layout for the Radeon 7 cards, so they basically took the Instinct series circuit board (small and expensive, with lots of layers) and they also reused the parts on the Instinct circuit boards like VRM chips, capacitors, inductors and so on - being a high end professional card, the Instinct reference design uses more expensive components... the VRM for example is overkill for the Radeon 7, and costs a lot of money.  They could have made a VRM circuit probably 30-50$ cheaper if they had time to make a custom reference design. Think of it like the empty circuit board costing 50$ to make, but they could have spent 1 month and around $10-20k  in salaries to design an alternative reference circuit board (and then weeks to VALIDATE circuit board and so on) that was bigger but with fewer layers which would cost only 20-30$ to make - when you make 50k+ video card circuit boards and you have that month of time, those $10-20k in salaries for the circuit board designer don't matter because you save money with the cheaper pcb... but AMD had to rush a product and they were aware it would be sold only for a few months until Navi comes out so probably said it's not worth doing a reference design.

 

When they sell the Instinct card for 1000$+ those 30-50$ in VRM chips alone don't matter, but the Radeon 7 had to be sold at a lower price point, at around 700$ where the GTX 1080 cards were at that time, because every reviewer would automatically make the comparison between Radeon 7 and GTX 1080 and RTX cards .

 

So basically  expensive HBM2 memory , expensive reference circuit board, expensive VRM and components on reference board, that explains the small quantity - they're not making much profit on these Radeon 7 cards

 

[ch3w2oy]

1 hour ago, MeatFeastMan said:

What is the point in that though? Surely selling a gpu needs to achieve one of two aims: either to make a profit or to gain market share. If it costs too much to make and it's in limited quantity, then it achieves neither of those things. That would make it completely pointless to sell.

Maybe so no one forgets the name AMD when they finally release something better? 

 

It wouldn't be the first time a company sold something for less than the manufacturing cost..

[FANGXP]

Hey, there's actually a 2 day sale on Newegg:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131743&Description=radeon vii&cm_re=radeon_vii-_-14-131-743-_-Product