AMD has allegedly stopped production of its first 7nm GPU, the Radeon VII. The reason is said to be the low performance difference to the RX 5700 XT.
Radeon VII: expensive gap filler with a lot of HBM2
With the Radeon VII, AMD introduced the first 7nm graphics card for consumers at the beginning of the year. It’s a modification of the Radeon Instinct MI50, which was only intended for servers, and the old Vega architecture. AMD had ported this to 7nm. Since the company was visibly under pressure due to Nvidia’s Turing series, the Radeon VII was created without further ado. In addition to 60 Vega 2 compute units, it also brought the full 16 gigabyte HBM2 memory of the Radeon Instinct MI50 with it. Only the PCIe 4.0 interface and some workstation features are missing.
The Radeon VII was supposed to be the main opponent of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080. After the launch, however, the disillusionment was great. Thus the graphics card performed slower than the RTX 2080 in most games. However, it is well suited for compute tasks due to the immensely fast video memory. The HBM2 stacks are a big advantage with speeds of over one terabyte per second and 16 gigabytes of capacity. However, this also had its price. At the start the Radeon VII cost $729, meanwhile the prices have fallen to $670. One of the price drivers is the expensive HBM2 memory.
However, the fate of the Radeon VII was clear from the start. AMD itself designed the graphics card with a powerful cooler with three axial fans. At the beginning there were rumors that custom versions of the AIBs are completely forbidden and there will be only 5,000 pieces for the launch. Fortunately, both of these things did not come true, but there are still no custom models. Probably also for good reason.
AMD allegedly stops Radeon VII production after only five months
As the French website cowcotland reports, the Radeon VII has already reached end-of-life status after only five months. According to the report, production will be discontinued and only residual stock will be sold. The reason is the recently released Radeon Navi graphics card RX 5700 XT. It performs in games only 5 to 10 percent below the Radeon VII, but costs significantly less. Custom models of the board partners could further reduce the gap.
The production costs are probably also a problem for AMD. The Vega 2 graphics card finally has its genes from a server and workstation graphics card with a much more complex structure. The HBM2 memory is expensive and requires a complex connection via a multi-chip module. In addition, there is a much more expensive power supply. The performance per watt is also not good compared to the RX 5700 XT. The end of production of the Radeon VII is therefore no big surprise. However, the fact that the end comes after five months on the market is quite abrupt.
A hint for a high-end Navi GPU?
But the end of the Radeon VII could also point to something else. After all, AMD positioned the graphics card against Nvidia’s high-end. Although the company was far from approaching the RTX 2080 Ti, the potential is there again thanks to the Navi architecture. Maybe in the near future there could be higher offshoots, which even significantly exceed the RX 5700 XT. By then at the latest, the Radeon VII would have become completely superfluous anyway. So if you still want to buy one of the graphics cards, you should probably hurry. The cheapest model currently costs $669.99 at Newegg.