Monday, July 8th 2013
Radeon HD 7990 "Malta" To Be Discontinued in Q3-2013: Report
Weak demand and stiff competition from NVIDIA's offerings could lead to AMD discontinuing its flagship graphics card, the Radeon HD 7990 "Malta," by the end of Q3 (end of September). The card was launched just this April, as a redux of last year's misfired Radeon HD 7990 "New Zealand," after getting power draw and performance-per-Watt right. Availability of Radeon HD 7990 has been greatly slimmed, so inventories dry out by the end of Q3. Radeon HD 7990 is commanding a steep four-figure price that's on-par with NVIDIA's offerings that it's trying to compete with, GeForce GTX TITAN, and GTX 690. Rather than lowering prices of the card to make it competitive, it looks like AMD decided to discontinue it, within a fixed time frame (Q3). Perhaps it's an indication of AMD's rumored Radeon HD 9000 series' October arrival not being a unicorn?
We just received following statement from AMD: "AMD has not EOL'd the world's fastest graphics card, the AMD Radeon HD 7990". So, all this says is that the card is not end-of-life (EOL) yet, but may be EOL'd in the future.. or not.
Sources:
Overclockers.ru, ThinkComputers
23 Comments on Radeon HD 7990 "Malta" To Be Discontinued in Q3-2013: Report
More like discontinue the 7970 or anything that came out first.
Of course, I understand business and why they choose not to pick on the Single GPUs, but this also indicates that something is big is coming, but unfortunately not soon enough since GTX 700 has been out and taking profits from AMD.
No use beating the dead horse when new hardware designs fix issues that software cannot. :p
TBH i think its probably sells that has caused this, and something in production which competes for less.......................................................................
at least, when the 690 came out, it was only 10-20 bucks more expensive than dual 680s, yet this thing came out well after 7970s were selling for 400 apiece.
and now it is being discontinued 6 months after it comes out, while the 690 is still selling more than a year after its introduction. AMD, what on earth are you thinking?
Impressive.
Keeping the price high would allow the card to stay in stock without the need for anything more than nominal production...and if it's in stock it stays on most sites benchmark ladder - and that was the object of the exercise to start with- a reference design that could continue to feature in benchmark suites where a vendor designed board ( TUL, HIS, Asus Ares II) could not.
2x 1792sp 256-bit at higher clocks would be a similar design (assuming crossfire works) and a hell of a lot cheaper than using Tahiti. Why on earth would they continue making the older version?
Similarly, 2560/384-bit at 11xx/7000 would be similar to Titan.
At least one, if not both of those designs is bound to happen...and likely are going to be forced to be cheaper while performing similarly, a luxury 7990 can't afford.
This seems like a foregone conclusion and obvious. 7990 makes no sense in an updated market. Too expensive for it's efficiency versus newer designs and competition.
Farewell Malta, we hardly even knew ye...
It seems other OEMs reportedly had the same issues and hence the card was never offered for quad xfire systems by boutique system builders.
This is a design defect having to do with the way the fans create a lot of turbulence between cards regardless of how many slots you leave between them, defeating the whole purpose of using more than one card...