AMD Radeon VII video card already seems end-of-life after six months

AMD has stopped production of the Radeon VII, introduced in February this year, and has glued its end-of-life status to the card. That assures the American maker of build-to-order systems Puget Systems.

Puget Systems reports multiple times in a benchmark article with results from the Nvidia RTX Super cards versus AMD’s Radeon RX 5700 offering that the Radeon VII is end-of-life. Commenting that the card is still widely available, despite earlier rumors of a very limited supply, the computer builder responds that it was confirmed with AMD’s ‘100 percent’ EOL status before it started the GPU round-up: “Remaining supply doesn’t mean it’s still being made.”

AMD introduced the Radeon VII in February. The card contains the 7nm Vega 20 GPU, a chip of the second Vega generation, in combination with 16GB hbm2. Why AMD will stop with the card so soon after introduction has not been disclosed, but the company did release the Radeon 5700 and 5700XT in July. The performance of those cards in games is slightly less than that of the Radeon VII, but not much, while they are a lot cheaper.

The Vega 20 GPU of the Radeon VII is not designed for gaming, but for Radeon Instinct accelerators that are used for deep learning calculations, for example. The Radeon 5700 and 5700XT are built around the 7nm Navi GPU that is specifically aimed at gaming. It therefore seems that the Radeon VII was a temporary interim solution for AMD, to be able to compete with Nvidia’s RTX cards until the cards with Navi-gpu were ready.

When the Radeon VII was announced, it already appeared that the card is almost identical to the Radeon Instinct Mi 50 accelerator. AMD also confirmed that and said at the time that no other variants of the card would be released for gamers. The Instinct Mi 50 for data centers will probably remain in the range.