The last few weeks for AMD have been pretty remarkable. The chipmaker is firing on all cylinders: the Ryzen 9 9900X3D and 9950X3D have arrived to universal praise, the Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” processors finally launched to wide acclaim, and the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards brought the RDNA 4 architecture and a much-needed injection of sane pricing to a downright brutal graphics market.
AMD’s David McAfee agrees, stating outright that it has been “a pretty amazing couple of weeks” for the company when speaking to us in an interview yesterday. With that said, not everyone is elated at AMD right now; the new hardware is difficult to come by currently, in particular the Radeon RX 9070 GPUs. Certainly “I’m angry because I’m unable to throw money at you right now” is a good problem to have, at least in the short-term. But will it continue?
Not if AMD has anything to say about it. As part of our live chat yesterday, McAfee (who is AMD’s Corporate VP and General Manager) said that he’s well aware of the RDNA 4 stock shortage frustrations and that the company is doing everything it can to help resolve them. Specifically, what he said was this:
The demand that we saw on day one was really unprecedented […] priority number one is restocking all of our partners, [which] means all the way from retailers and e-tailers back to our add-in board partners. […] As we look forward at our graphics business throughout the rest of this year we want to make sure that users are able to buy cards at the prices that they expect to see in market. We’re doing everything we can to make that happen […] I think as we refill the channel from what happened last week you’ll see more supply coming across not just the opening price points but across the entire range as we look at the rest of this quarter (Q2) and beyond.
McAfee is a very smart guy, technically adept and highly experienced as an executive, too. Given that, it’s no surprise that his response is both reassuring but also measured. You see, we didn’t bring it up directly, but one of the main frustrations that enthusiasts have voiced regarding the pricing of RDNA 4 graphics cards has to do with the fact that some AIB models are marked up considerably over the given MSRP, sometimes to the tune of as much as $200. The Radeon RX 9070 XT is extremely compelling at $599, but less so at $799.
As such, McAfee’s response specifically notes that while there definitely will be additional stock at $599, he’s also suggesting that you might expect to pay a little more than that if you really want one—not because of scalping, but because you may find AIB models with a price hike are more readily available than the MSRP models. McAfee spoke more on this topic specifically:
I think one of the things that’s important to address is that there are pieces of the graphics business that are far more complicated […] than our CPU business. On the CPU business […] we control that end to end. With the launch of RDNA 4, we sell an ASIC to our board partners who then have a range of designs that they want to enable, and then the end retailers and e-tailers around the world are the ones who are picking the assortment of cards that they want to carry for day one. We can help in that process, but it’s something that we don’t honestly directly control. The biggest thing that we can do, and the biggest thing that we are doing quite honestly is ramping supply of Navi 48 very very aggressively.
What David is saying is, if you can’t find an RDNA 4 card at MSRP, don’t blame AMD. On the one hand, it’s probably true that AMD could play pricing hardball with its partners the way NVIDIA purportedly does. On the other hand, look at the statements from NVIDIA’s partners about how much money they make off of GeForce graphics cards.
We also asked McAfee about the confusion between the 304W and 340W power specs for the Radeon RX 9070 XT. Putting it plainly: 304W is the power spec, but the GPU is known to handle 340W and AMD’s partners are allowed to ship their cards configured that way if they choose. In other words, there may be a bit more of a difference between a “stock” Navi 48 card and a partner model than is usually the case. Hopefully that justifies the mark-up.
If you haven’t watched out interview, you should do so! It’s quite interesting to hear McAfee give his perspective on AMD’s recent successes, and he also drops a few factoids that are exclusive to this chat. We’re not going to spoil it for you though; you can watch the embed above to get the full details. And while you’re there, please like and subscribe to the channel and do us a solid.