The launch reviews of AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 64 and 56 have shown that at suggested retail prices of $499 US and $399 US, respectively, those cards do feature a decent price/performance level. The only problem so far: the cards don’t sell at these prices - yet. Instead they are massively more expensive.


Currently the usual assumptions are that the still ongoing mining hype is messing up the supply chain, causing way higher demand than expected, which in turn leads to sky-high prices. But whether that is really the case or if AMD simply isn’t selling enough chips to its AIB partners, that remains unknown.

Meanwhile Techpowerup has received a copy of an invoice from an north American distributor to a retailer, who’s asking no less than $675 US for one single AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics card. This appears to be conclusive proof that something in the supply chain is completely upside down. This particular cards should set a customer $499 US back an in this case already the retailer has to pay $675 US. Since the retailer will have to make some money, the card will be sold for something like approximately $750 US, which means that about 10% margin for the retailer. In relation to the $499 US the card is actually supposed to cost this is no less than a 50% price difference.

It’s now been a few weeks th at AMD launched the Vega-based graphics cards and during these weeks the company would have already had some time to respond to this development, by increasing the supply, basically producing more chips and selling them to the AIB partners - if there really was such high demand from crypto currency miners. So far it looks like AMD is not increasing production of the Vega silicon, which seems - to say the least - there is a lot of uncertainty in the equation. The question that arises is: why wouldn’t more chips and ultimately graphics cards be produced if there was such high demand? One possible answer to this question would be that AMD is simply can’t do so - for whatever reasons.

What do you think about these latest developments and what do you think could be the reason why customers currently have to pay insane prices if they want to buy a Vega-based graphics card?



Source: Techpowerup