AMD Vega graphics cards bad manufacturing yields, NVIDIA push back Volta Q1 18

[TheOATeam]

I work in marketing in the electronics manufacturing industry, and saw this come across my desk today:

AMD Vega graphics cards are currently seeing tight supply in the retail channel reportedly due to an insufficient supply caused by low packaging yield rates
Monica Chen, Taipei; Joseph Tsai, DIGITIMES [Friday 25 August 2017]

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.

Commenting on the reported shortages, 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.

AMD’s Radeon RX Vega GPUs are currently manufactured via GlobalFoundries’ 14nm FinFET manufacturing process and are integrated with HBM2 memory from SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics. The packaging is handled by ASE using the SiP technology.

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.

With the challenge from the Vega GPUs not as big as expected, Nvidia is also not in a rush to begin mass shipments for its Volta-based GPUs at the end of 2017 and has rescheduled them for the first quarter of 2018 based on Vega’s status, according to industry sources.