Wednesday, December 9th 2020
AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6800 Reference Designs to be Discontinued Soon
Yesterday, Cowocotland, a technology website, has published information that AMD's reference design cards like the latest Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6800 GPUs are getting discontinued. That means that AMD will stop the production of the reference designs and rely completely on the supply of GPUs coming from add-in board partners to satisfy the market needs. This does not mean that the availability of these GPUs is not going to exist. Rather, there will not be AMD reference designs available for purchase from the company. Only cards that are custom made by AIBs, that AMD provides GPU+VRAM for, will offer customers cards with these GPUs.
VideoCardz claims that they have been able to confirm some pieces of the information, so it is a done deal. From now on, it seems that only graphics cards with Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6800 GPUs inside them will be the ones offered by AIBs. The reference design cards will only be produced until early 2021, giving it a month or two for consumers to purchase cards from AMD. After that period the market will rely completely on AMD's partners.
Update 4:30 pm UTC: Scott Herkelman, CVP & GM of AMD Radeon Tweeted that they have "extended the reference design builds indefinitely due to popular demand." Meaning that the reference cards will remain in production. Mr. Herkelman also thanked for feedback, where community was loud and clear that they want to see reference boards for a while longer.
Here is an interesting quote from Cowcotland:
Sources:
Cowcotland, via VideoCardz
VideoCardz claims that they have been able to confirm some pieces of the information, so it is a done deal. From now on, it seems that only graphics cards with Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6800 GPUs inside them will be the ones offered by AIBs. The reference design cards will only be produced until early 2021, giving it a month or two for consumers to purchase cards from AMD. After that period the market will rely completely on AMD's partners.
Update 4:30 pm UTC: Scott Herkelman, CVP & GM of AMD Radeon Tweeted that they have "extended the reference design builds indefinitely due to popular demand." Meaning that the reference cards will remain in production. Mr. Herkelman also thanked for feedback, where community was loud and clear that they want to see reference boards for a while longer.
[…] RX 6900 XT MBA is already at the end of its life even though it has not yet been launched. Just like the RX 6800 MBA and the RX 6800 XT MBA, production has been one shot for this card. A brand told us that they only have about forty cards for France, not one more […] those who manage to have an RX 6900 XT MBA will have a real collector [item] in their hands.—Aurélien LAGNY, Cowcotland
100 Comments on AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 6800 XT, and RX 6800 Reference Designs to be Discontinued Soon
www.amd.com/en/shop/us/Graphics%20Cards
One would have to be pretty insane to seriously believe that AIBs would sell cards at zero profit or worse just because AMD wants them to. AMD may be willing to lose money but they aren't.They're all custom models from what I can see. I think what he wanted to say is that AMD does not directly sell unbranded reference models.
Anyway, the point is AIBs never really want to sell reference cards because those inevitability have the lowest margins, so they'd much rather sell a custom model that has more or less the same cost to manufacture at a higher price.
What the actual heck is happening.
www.techpowerup.com/272868/amd-rx-5700-series-reportedly-enter-eol-no-longer-manufacturedI think AMD sells their own reference cards directly to consumers only in a few countries, the US among them, but I don't know if they did it before, so it could be their first time doing this. But from what I heard on Reddit you would only see their cards if at the time there was stock, otherwise the cards would simply not show up.
Not only they made a paper launch (and I’d like to have a word with that Frank Azor and his $10... ridiculous ), beating even the very bad Nvidia launch.
They fooled us with MSRP about a product never sold and already “discontinued” (well, you can’t really discontinue a product that doesn’t actually exists, can you ?).
Not to speak about underwhelming RT performance and inconsistent general performance ...
I had very high expectations about AMD this time, but they messed things up pretty bad.
Even sadder, the quality of the text. Six or seven sentences, one after the other, stating the same thing. I'm trying to be a better person and not do callouts, but this is egregious. Do you have a minimum length requirement for the news articles?
But let me be a tiny bit constructive in my harsh criticism. Here are a number of talking points you could address in order to improve the article:
- the cards
- launch dates (so soon?)
- low availability / inflated prices (in comparison, 5700XT "50th Anniversary Edition" cards are still around)
- performance
- design / compatibility (compact cooling solutions go well with small cases)
- most custom designs eliminated the USB-C port (the reason many would've bought AMD over nVIDIA this generation)
- lament about 2020 in general
- AMD lied about stock (if you want to ruffle some feathers)
And so many things you could've talked about as filler to get to that character/word limit. Filler that could be marginally helpful for less then informed readers. Instead, the same thing, repeated, over and over again.