David McAfee, AMD Vice President and General Manager over Client Channel Business, called the demand for AMD’s newest GPU release “really unprecedented” this week. In an appearance on HotHardware’s Thursday livestream, McAfee shared some details about what caused RX 9070 and RX 9070 XTs to sell out worldwide at blistering speed, and AMD’s plans to get the cards into the hands of customers now and in the far future.
McAfee, who oversees much of AMD’s consumer CPU and GPU businesses, was amazed by the success of the RX 9000-series’ first wave. “The launch of RDNA 4 was really a milestone event for our graphics business. The demand was very, very, very strong all around the world,” said the Radeon boss.
The AMD RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 hit the shelves on March 6th, heralding the beginning of AMD’s “RDNA 4” GPU generation. Though the cards launched with a $599/$549 price tag, one week later it is near impossible to find the cards for this price, as all models of the cards across all of AMD’s board partners are either sold out or being sold for as much as 22% over the MSRP from legitimate retailers.
McAfee explained in part why selling GPUs for appropriate prices and with ample stock can be a challenging game. “In [AMD’s CPU business], we put a processor in a box, we set a price for that product, we ship it directly into the market, and we control that end-to-end.”
In stark contrast to this, AMD’s supply chain for selling GPUs involves a large number of AIB partners, which buy AMD’s ASICs and build multiple models of each GPU, which models are then selected and ordered from by primary sellers.