Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
What happened to the Hawaii cards?
The Radeon R9 390 and R9 390X supplies are greatly dwindling on both New Egg and Amazon. The remaining ones are priced much less competitively. There's a good chance that it's just AMD discontinuing the cards to make room for next generation products. A 438 mm^2 die with a 512-bit memory bus is hardly cheap, and selling such expensive cards at a little over $300 each is not nearly as large of a profit margin as Nvidia surely gets on its GTX 970 and 980 in the analogous price ranges.
But neither is a little over $300 a low enough price that AMD would lose money on every card sold. You don't discontinue an old product that is still profitable until the new one is ready. It's possible that there could be some hiccup in supplies, but I'd interpret this as it being likely that a Polaris-based replacement for Hawaii is coming soon.
Incidentally, there is no such shortage of AMD's Bonaire, Pitcairn, Tonga, or Fiji based cards. As the first three are much smaller dies for much cheaper cards and the last fetches a much higher price, I'd expect AMD to be more pleased with their profit margins on the other chips than Hawaii.
If Polaris is coming soon (and AMD has promised that it will be out around the middle of this year), that's good news for AMD. But if the larger Polaris is a Hawaii replacement and the smaller presumably for something lower end (AMD compared it to a GeForce GTX 950 in a demonstration), that's not the new high end cards that gamers were hoping for. For that, we'll probably have to wait for Vega next year. Unless you want a gaming laptop, in which case, Polaris can't get here soon enough.
But neither is a little over $300 a low enough price that AMD would lose money on every card sold. You don't discontinue an old product that is still profitable until the new one is ready. It's possible that there could be some hiccup in supplies, but I'd interpret this as it being likely that a Polaris-based replacement for Hawaii is coming soon.
Incidentally, there is no such shortage of AMD's Bonaire, Pitcairn, Tonga, or Fiji based cards. As the first three are much smaller dies for much cheaper cards and the last fetches a much higher price, I'd expect AMD to be more pleased with their profit margins on the other chips than Hawaii.
If Polaris is coming soon (and AMD has promised that it will be out around the middle of this year), that's good news for AMD. But if the larger Polaris is a Hawaii replacement and the smaller presumably for something lower end (AMD compared it to a GeForce GTX 950 in a demonstration), that's not the new high end cards that gamers were hoping for. For that, we'll probably have to wait for Vega next year. Unless you want a gaming laptop, in which case, Polaris can't get here soon enough.
Comments
And yeah, some of us have been eyeing 390s "out of stock" status for a few days now. What will be launched instead, 480 with same performance and 249$ price or 490 for 349$...or both...well it seems....somewhat imminent. There are only 2 real listings on newegg atm (anything for >349$ is not selling for a good reason ;P)
Theres always a possibility they underestimated how long it would take to clear the channels trhough ;P
Theres also a matter of missing 400mm Polaris die. P10 is supposed 232mm, P11 123mm and Vega is rumored full 600mm