AMD allegedly not launching Radeon RX 6700 non-XT alongside RX 6700 XT

AMD Radeon RX 6700 delayed?

Cowcotland claims that cut-down Navi 22 is not launching with RX 6700XT.

AMD announced its reveal event for March 3rd, and it was believed that AMD could be showing more than just one card, according to Cowcotland, however, that is not the case. AMD is would allegedly only showcase one card, the RX 6700 XT, the full-fat Navi22 model, with RX 6700 non-XT (cut-down Navi22) being delayed.

We tried to get more information from Cowcotland but they were unable to provide further details. What seems apparent from the article is that AMD is not launching two cards at the same time, but rather delaying the launch of the second model:

We have some new information on AMD’s announcement on March 3. Only the RX 6700 XT will be announced. There was indeed an RX 6700 in the red program, for March 15th, but it has been delayed (for the moment) and we will therefore only have the RX 6700 XT which will be commercially available on March 18th.

— Cowcotland

What is probably far more worrisome is the fact that only 100 reference cards (so-called MBA designs) will be delivered to France. This does not include custom cards, but Cowcotland claims that they should be limited to hundreds as well. The stock is clearly better than RX 6800 series, which were limited to double-digit numbers with some countries not receiving any at launch. We have been told that AIBs have been stocking these cards for a while, so there certainly will be stock, just not in numbers that could ever meet the demand.

AMD Radeon RX 6700 non-XT would feature Navi 22 XL GPU with an unknown number of cores. This model had already appeared in the leaks and it is said that it would feature 6GB GDDR6 memory, half of what the XT variant is expected to offer. AMD might simply be waiting for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 6GB, which as far as we know, has been delayed as well (the card is not even listed in the roadmap anymore). What seems hard to understand is why both AMD and NVIDIA have prioritized 12GB models at this point in time, when the 6GB models would probably be cheaper to make.

AMD has not confirmed yet if the reference Radeon RX 6700 XT design is a one-off release. For some regions buying these cards at launch is literally the only chance to them at their officially MSRP. For MBA designs things are even more complex because AMD tends to restock their US store way more often than other regions. Meanwhile, AIB reference models tend to disappear from stores completely.

Buying Radeon RX 6000 MBA model in Europe is simply impossible at the moment, Source: AMD

Source: Cowcotland