AMD has officially unleashed details about its new Navi-powered RX 5500-series graphics cards. Just not the important ones like what graphics cards will actually be available, how much they’ll cost, or when you can buy them. What AMD has said, however, is that they won’t suffer from any supply issues despite TSMC’s rather well documented 7nm production strains.
In fact AMD’s Simon Ng has told us that RX 5500-series availability will be “abundant.” And that’s good news considering they’re set to be the volume GPUs of the Navi generation, the cards that get jammed into more gaming PCs than any RX 5700 or RX 5700 XT GPU.
It’s especially good news if the pricing does indeed turn out to be knocking around the Nvidia GTX 1650 level. AMD has published benchmarks showing the RX 5500’s dominance over the $150 GTX Turing card, and if that is the price point the red team is targeting for the lower spec Navi GPU then we are in for a treat.
During a pre-announcement briefing AMD’s Simon Ng explained that, despite the widely reported manufacturing constraints at its production partner, TSMC, there wouldn’t be a problem with availability for the new RX 5500-series GPUs.
“We do fully expect the RX 5500-series availability to have no problems,” he says. “We’ve worked with our partners over at TSMC to ensure that we have ramped up the overall production with the RX 5700-series as well. We have a lot of lessons that we’ve learned and we’ve continued to develop and grow our 7nm process there. And, as well, capacity.
“So I would say right now we fully expect that availability of the RX 5500-series standalone GPUs will be abundant.”
Considering the fact that AMD product launches haven’t always gone off without a hitch that’s very promising. The seriously impressive RX 5700-series didn’t seem to have too many problems with availability, after all, but then they are unlikely to be bought in as great numbers as the mainstream Navi 14-based GPUs.
After the performance details that AMD has shared we’re excited to see just how the new cards perform when they launch, probably this month.
But the price is going to be a key issue for the RX 5500-series GPUs, and with it being an add-in board (AIB) partner launch, rather than AMD providing reference cards, we’ll see overclocked SKUs right from day one. And that means the likes of Asus, Gigabyte, Sapphire, and MSI are going to be shipping their most powerful, most expensive variants out the door first.