News UK gets just 100 Radeon VII cards at launch, claims OCUK

Can't say i'm surprised

 

Would take everything he says with a veritable mountain of salt. His job is hyping up sales for his company, and what better way to do so than by telling everyone that supply is extremely limited but that he has cards available, but only if you're quick!

Not saying that he is 100% talking pish, and it's long been rumoured that production of VII will be of limited quantities, but I trust him about as far as I could throw him.

 

I know I've seen import records for mystery *insert name here* GPUs, CPUs, etc, etc so wouldn't something like how many have been imported be recorded an possible to check, that is if someone a) knew how to do that, b) could be A'ed, and c) HMRC weren't incompetent or stuck in a paper based world.

 

What a unique and unprecedented situation that totally did not also happen with the Vega launch.

From Zauba, for India and the US. As far as I am aware there is no analogous public database for HMRC's records.

 

Come on, he works for OCUK and has an interest in their success, so quoting a Wikipedia definition of his job title to me is a bit patronising, don't you think? Add in the fact that he's got form for hyping stuff on the OCUK forums and I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that this is marketing as much as anything else, whether the specified quantities are correct or not (and note that he says they will have over half of the UK allocation of c 100 cards, so it's not like 44 is the final number anyway, and they might not release all 44 in a single tranche).

And to reiterate, I'm not saying that he's lying or his numbers are BS, as there's no way of disproving them.

 

Bah, so much for a magical technological solution.

 

Regardless of his job and vested interest in his company’s performance, if there is any truth to the statement, even if they got all 100 cards, he wouldn’t need to be winding the hype machine. He could say nothing and they would sell through that allocation of stock in a day or two, probably far less time.

What is more concerning is that if this is indeed the initial allocation of stock, 100 units is a paltry number for the UK. I’m not sure why you’d bother launching with such scarce availability. Buyers suffer and pay more, but the likes of AMD aren’t the ones to directly benefit as the hiked up prices are often the doing of the sellers. Why not delay the international release by a week or two or three to get some inventory into the channel? Scarcity of this nature is plainly unhelpful.

 

In short: as long as they have at least one on sale, the Radeon VIII does what it's intended to do: slots an AMD card in amongst the new RTX series. In most games, their top-of-the-like card (RX Vega 64) is trading blows with the RTX 2060 and consistently trails behind the 2070. Radeon VII needs to bench somewhere in the middle of the pack in reviews, but that's all it really needs to do as a response to the RTX series launch. For actual consumer availability, that can wait for a few months as with the Vega FE series to the RX Vega series.

 

44 cards probably equals the amount of people in the UK interested in such a card

 

*Wants to drum up some hype for new Radeon VII cards*
We'll only get 44 cards
*Barrage of customers calling up to cancel their order since they clearly won't get one*
I DIDN'T MEAN IT I DIDN'T MEAN IT!

 

Yeah I was just going to say that. He continually posts winking threads and god knows what else into the Graphics Card area of the forum showing all of the deals. I think he is more than just a buyer he's more like their Swiss army knife of buying and selling.

 

Opinions about Gibbo aside, techpowerup did dig up some French publication that also claims extremely limited availability...

https://www.techpowerup.com/252283/...eu-france-and-spain-only-have-dozens-of-cards

 

That'r be yer interposer.

Failure rates on all HBM cards was always very high. Every reviewer who has received a review unit also got a complete die as part of the stand. All HBM cards really weren't very economical. I see the VII release as more of a gesture to make it look like AMD are still current, whilst getting Navi ready. I think had Navi been done? we'd never have seen this card at all. It's been quite a while since Vega 56 and 64 launched and I suppose they didn't want to appear like they were doing nothing for the next 6-9 months (according to Gibbo).