It's practically confirmed - the AMD RX Vega GPU series will be formally introduced before the end of May via the Computex 2017 in Taiwan and the product release date will follow no later than June. However, it's likely that the product launch will be plagued by supply shortage.
The initial shipment of the RX Vega series, which is AMD's answer to the NVIDIA flagship graphics cards like the GTX 1080, 1080 Ti and Titan Xp, in the first few months of availability will be limited to only 16,000 GPU units. WCCFTech said the numbers appear to be the allocation for worldwide shipment, indicating that the Vega debut could be greeted by supply shortage issues in some markets.
"AMD will only produce 16,000 units of RX Vega for consumers in the first few months of launch. This would indicate that retail stores around the globe will be hit by a major shortage early on, leaving consumers looking to buy the new graphics card stranded," the report said.
The cause of the delay is the projected limited availability and high price of the HBM2 memory. The component is crucial to the Vega GPU as for it to be fully functional "it needs to be housed on a fully functional interposer, along with fully functional HBM2 and a fully operational GPU," WCCFTech said.
The report added that the HBM2 production and supply issues are not expected to normalize soon, indicating that for many the RX Vega GPUs will be hard to find in the immediate months following the cards' initial market appearance.
A possible result would be price surging or higher sticker price, which WCCFTech said was first seen with the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X in 2015.
Meanwhile, Videocardz said in a related report that AMD only managing to ship out 16,000 cards for the RX Vega series is not totally problematic. The number of units reported for the first batch of global shipments "are actually quite normal for the flagship model, especially from AMD," considering that multiple actors are involved to deliver the fully functional GPU card, the report added.
The same report also claimed AMD will likely unleash three Radeon graphics cards under the RX Vega series and the release date is set before the end of June or a few weeks following the product intro via the Computex 2017.