RX Vega Shortage to Extend Until October?

You can’t buy an AMD RX Vega graphics card right now for love nor money. We’ve cryptocurrency miners snapping up every card they can get their hands on to thank for that. However, it seems there’s another factor at play: the difficulty of integrating high bandwidth memory (HBM) into Vega GPUs. In fact, a new report claims this issue will keep RX Vega cards off shelves until at least October.

RX Vega Shortage

According to DigiTimes, HBM and ASE issues are exacerbating low RX Vega yields. Monica Chen and Joseph Tsai report:

“AMD’s new Radeon RX Vega series graphics cards, which have become available since August 15, are currently seeing tight supply in the retail channel reportedly due to an insufficient supply caused by low packaging yield rates, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

Some sources pointed out that Vega’s design of integrating high bandwidth memory (HBM) into the GPU has significantly raised the difficulty of the related packaging process and hence resulted in low yield rates. However, some other sources claimed that the issue may be down to problems with Advanced Semiconductor Engineering’s (ASE) packaging technology.”

AMD: “Demand Continues to Exceed Expectations”

In response, AMD plans to restock retailers and distributors in the coming weeks. Though – as we reported – some retailers are paying more than MSRP for Vega cards. However, despite new stock, supplies will be limited over the next few weeks. Chen and Tsai write:

“AMD said that Radeon RX Vega64 demand continues to exceed expectations and the company is working closely with its partners to address this demand. AMD is also working with its partners to restock all SKUs of Radeon RX Vega64 including the standalone cards and Gamer Packs over the next few weeks, and consumers should expect quantities of Vega to start arriving in the coming days.

Because of the shortages, most graphics card vendors are only able to receive limited supply of the Vega GPUs and the shortages could last until October.”