AMD Radeon RX Vega: less than 20,000 available at launch

AMD will be releasing its next-gen Radeon RX Vega family of graphics cards in the next few weeks, and now I've had an exclusive industry source who has told me that AMD will have only a handful of Radeon RX Vega graphics cards at launch.

I've been told that there will be less than 16,000 cards that will ship in the first few months after it launches, something that will come down to the HBM2 used on the card. HBM2 is in extremely limited supply, and is expensive to use - and since there's not enough, that scarcity is driving up the production costs of the card - and will see AMD only having 16,000 cards or so in the months post-launch.

If this is true, AMD could be in a very rough spot with Radeon RX Vega - especially if it was to deliver on performance. There are hundreds of thousands of thirsty Radeon fans that want a next-gen graphics card, and the hype train for Radeon RX Vega is simultaneously withering out - and burning hotter than the sun. Personally, I want AMD to hit a home run with Radeon RX Vega - but at the same time, NVIDIA has completely secured the high-end market with the GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti.

We can expect a family of cards, with the latest rumors on performance of what should hopefully be the GTX 1070 competitor in RX Vega form above. It's a prototype card, and a rumored benchmark run - but, if it's true - how many of these cards would fill up that 16,000 quantity if there are other higher-end SKUs made available in the Radeon RX Vega family.