AMD Denies “End-of-Life” Radeon RX 5700, 5700 XT Rumors

[Tsing]

French hardware site Cowcotland published a story on Wednesday claiming that AMD had already killed off its reference Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT cards. It implied that upcoming aftermarket cards had made their blower design obsolete, but the report has now been debunked.

AMD told PC World that there was no truth to the story; the reference design will still be available for companies that want it. The reason for the change in supply was to reduce competition with partners.

“We expect there will continue to be strong supply of Radeon RX 5700 series graphics cards in the market, with multiple designs starting to arrive from our AIB partners,” AMD officials said. “As is standard practice, once the inventory of the AMD reference cards has been sold, AMD will continue to support new partner designs with Radeon RX 5700 series reference design kit.”

 

[ThreeDee]

Who is this "parters" character that they are competing with?

I'm digging my reference 5700xt but look forward to what AMD's "partners" bring to the table with their coolers and what not

 

[Dan_D]

MSI is the largest manufacturer of AMD based GPU's by quite a bit. But, reference cards do not compete against AIB's. AIB's can buy the reference cards if they want to and many do. They'll offer reference and non-reference designs, with the latter coming in at a premium. The only reason not to make a reference card, is if the AIB's can produce a superior design at nearly the same or even at a lower cost.

There are only a couple AIB's that could potentially pull that off. ASUS certainly, possibly MSI and GIGABYTE too.

 

[Grimlakin]

There are plenty of partners out there that produce AMD hardware. It makes good business sense not to step on them in the sales department. They only make the volume that the partners want to resell. Seems like smart business to me.