Tuesday, December 8th 2020
Largest Swiss Retailer Digitec to Receive a Grand Total of 35 AMD RX 6900 XT Graphics Cards for Launch
AMD's launch of their top of the line RX 6900 XT graphics card seems that it will have even less availability than the company's high-end RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT graphics card. This isn't surprising; the RX 6900 XT is a 590 mm² beast of a GPU with all of its execution units enabled - that's a lot of die space to harvest without a single silicon fault, no matter how good TSMC's 7 nm manufacturing process really is. Stock will be scarce, and likely will be scarce throughout the lifetime of the product, especially with the clogged, unmet, existing demand for high performance GPUs from a world population that has turned to gaming as a solace in times of quarantine.
Digitec, the largest Swiss retailer (serving a population of 8.5 million people), is only receiving 35 RX 6900 XT graphics cards for launch. We don't know, of course, what exactly is the Swiss demand for high-performance graphics cards, but it being one of the world's wealthiest countries (when it comes to its population's average income) it's expected to be higher than other countries with comparable population but lower income. As a result, the retailer isn't even putting the cards up for sale as they normally would; instead, there's a sweepstakes of sorts where 35 random users that opt-in for the event will receive a code that allows them to purchase the graphics card for its retail price of $999. An interesting solution, albeit of course, it just signals the dimension of the cards' availability issues.
Sources:
Digitec, via Videocardz
Digitec, the largest Swiss retailer (serving a population of 8.5 million people), is only receiving 35 RX 6900 XT graphics cards for launch. We don't know, of course, what exactly is the Swiss demand for high-performance graphics cards, but it being one of the world's wealthiest countries (when it comes to its population's average income) it's expected to be higher than other countries with comparable population but lower income. As a result, the retailer isn't even putting the cards up for sale as they normally would; instead, there's a sweepstakes of sorts where 35 random users that opt-in for the event will receive a code that allows them to purchase the graphics card for its retail price of $999. An interesting solution, albeit of course, it just signals the dimension of the cards' availability issues.
28 Comments on Largest Swiss Retailer Digitec to Receive a Grand Total of 35 AMD RX 6900 XT Graphics Cards for Launch
And forget about rebranding with Instinct GPUs. Instinct uses a different architecture and IIRC it's not like it's simply lacking the HDMI/DP port, it literally lacks the capability to output video signal in the core itself.
that would have been funny
It seems Microsoft messed up also, they just let Sony get the jump on them, by not launching enough consoles.
But as far as AMD difficulties to supply, there are few things to say
1. 6900xt are clearly the top binned parts, i wonder if they also keep a reserve for a future pro product that would have higher margin.
2. They had to fulfill the Sony/Microsoft deals first as both wanted to launch as many console as possible for the holidays
3. The chip is still huge, the chance of defect on a huge chips is higher, it may also happen in a location they can disable.
4. They were not sure on the final spec until last minute as per the rumors. They need 2-3 month to really ramp up the production at minimum. They probably launched it while production just started.
As for Nvidia:
1. Selling a bunch of chips to Miner won't help gamer card availability for sure
2. The chip is also huge (same as Navi21). Meaning higher rate of defect
3. Samsung still learning to make big chip. they used to mostly do memory/nand and cellphone soc.
And for both, global transport is slow down. They used unused space on commercial flight to ship parts and the number of these flights are much lower than pre-covid. The fallback solution is commercial freight flight (that cost much higher.) or slower method of transport. This will last for a long time but will be resolved eventually.
So be patient. And yes, maybe your config is still fine !
Edit: I wish manufacturers didn't design chips and cooling solutions that run hardware to its thermal limits without adjusting settings. I mean, I remember when you didn't even need a heatsink for a GPU, and even if you did, you never had to think about case airflow just to keep it within its operating temperature range. I understand the need for faster hardware, but still...
For true efficiency nerd though, when you drag the 3080 down to 220W, it will give better performance than 3070 which has stock TDP of 220W --> higher perf/watt. No overclocking involved here, just drag the power limit slider down.
For the price of 6800XT and 3080, AIBs are cutting their own margins by making exceptional coolers. If you check the Asus TUF 3080 review, the thermal/noise characteristic is almost the same as watercooling.
By reducing the power consumption of 3080 from 320W --> 220W, performance reduction is around 10-15% at most, meaning the 3080 at 220W still perform better than stock 3070. You can do it to the 3070 too but the efficiency gain by lowering the power limit is not as much as with the 3080.
If you look at the 2080 Super Max-Q reviews, you will see that at the same TDP of 80W, the 2080 Super Max-Q outperform all slower GPUs, even though the desktop 2080 Super has terrible perf/watt.