Shortages of AMD Radeon R9 Fury-series graphics cards persist

About three months since the formal announcement, Advanced Micro Devices’ flagship products based on the code-named “Fiji” graphics processing units are still in extremely short supply, according to a market analyst and various retailers.

At present, AMD offers Radeon R9 Fury X and Radeon R9 Nano based on the fully-fledged “Fiji” graphics chip with 4096 stream processors, 256 texture units, 64 raster operations pipelines and 4096-bit memory bus. Both the “Fury X” and the “Nano” graphics adapters are based on AMD’s design and are made under supervision of the company by a contract manufacturer. Asustek Computer and Sapphire Technology also offer AMD Radeon R9 Fury graphics cards powered by cut-down “Fiji” chips (3584 SPs, 224 TUs, 64 ROPs) and featuring custom design of cooling systems and printed circuit boards.

As it appears, AMD does not sell its cut-down “Fiji” graphics processors to many of its partners and does not allow the latter to customize adapters that feature fully-fledged “Fiji” GPUs. Consequently, for suppliers of graphics cards it makes more sense to sell Nvidia-based solutions right now.

“AMD’s flagship Fury X and Fury continue to have a very limited number of SKUs and are largely out of stock, suggesting that the pace of availability and ecosystem support is discouraging add-in-board (AIB) manufacture,” wrote Ian Ing, an analyst with MKM Partners, in an article at Barron’s.

Overclockers UK, a major online store in the U.K., offers to pre-order Radeon R9 Fury X, but has Radeon R9 Fury from Asustek Computer and Sapphire Technology in stock. AMD Radeon R9 Nano graphics cards are available from multiple suppliers. In fact, OcUK even offers a small discount on the Sapphire Radeon R9 Nano and sells them for £515.

Newegg.com, a major online store in the U.S., at press time only had Radeon R9 Fury X from VisionTek in stock. The store also has Radeon R9 Fury from Asustek Computer and Sapphire Technology available. AMD Radeon R9 Nano graphics cards are available from several brands, but all are sold at prices that exceed MSRP [manufacturer suggested retail price].

CaseKing.de, a major German retailer, does not have a single Radeon R9 Fury X in stock, but has multiple Radeon R9 Nano from different suppliers as well as Radeon R9 Fury from Asustek and Sapphire.

Insufficient availability of the AMD Radeon R9 Fury-series products have challenged AMD for about a quarter. The reasons for tight supply of the “Fiji” graphics processor are unclear. If AMD ran into yield issues with its largest graphics processor ever, then there would be products based on cut-down versions of “Fiji” available (e.g., Radeon R9 Fury or Radeon R9 Fury LE). However, the R9 Fury sold only by Asus and Sapphire, which means that there are not a lot of such chips available from AMD. The Radeon R9 Nano graphics cards are in stock of retailers, but it is the first week of its availability.

Limited availability of AMD Radeon R9 Fury-series graphics cards keeps prices of such graphics cards high and does not allow AMD to recapture market share it lost to Nvidia Corp. in the recent quarters.

AMD is in its quiet period and could not comment on the news-story.

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KitGuru Says: It looks like the amount of “Fiji” graphics processors in production is limited. As a result, if you are planning to get a Radeon R9 Fury graphics card, grab one while you can. For example, the Radeon R9 Nano can be acquired in the first week of availability. Perhaps, AMD will solve the issues with availability of its “Fiji” in the coming months, but not in the coming weeks or days.

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