French website Cowcotland, which is usually well oriented in the AIB’s supply channels, claims that the global GPU supply is also affected by a lack of GDDR6 memory.
AMD Radeon RX 6000 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 supply not to improve until February?
According to the report, NVIDIA and AMD may have trouble keeping up with the demand for its new graphics cards till at least February. While AMD has not made any public statements in regard to their supply situation, NVIDIA has repeatedly confirmed that global shortages of wafers, substrate, and components are affecting the availability of the Ampere graphics cards.
NVIDIA had not mentioned the memory supply problem before, however, it was something that we have heard about, even before the RTX 3070 graphics cards were released. Naturally the higher the capacity on the new GeForce models, the harder it is for a manufacturer to supply the chips to board partners.
According to our sources, it will take weeks for the situation to return to normal, which means that the availability of all models will not improve until February, even by blocking the release of some models (such as the 6900XT Custom) […]
— Aurélien LAGNY, Cowcotland
Graphics card makers often sell GPUs and memory modules together in bulk. Those are offered a lower price and are guaranteed to meet the specifications. Naturally, most AIBs tend to use this method supply. However, in this case, since there are fewer GDDR6 modules to supply, the GPU supply is also affected.
It is worth noting that GeForce RTX 3090 and RTX 3080 cards use GDDR6X memory, which Cowcotland claims to be ‘less impacted’ by the shortage. The GDDR6 supply issues are more likely to affect RTX 3070 and RTX 3060 Ti models which rely on this memory standard. Unfortunately, it will also affect all Radeon RX 6000 models, which use GDDR6 exclusively, and the previous generation of graphics cards from both manufacturers.
Source: Cowcotland
