We just got done with a short but specific conversation with AMD's Product Manager for the 5800 series, Dave Baumann, this morning. From what we are told, Dave is the person we need to be speaking with when it comes to Radeon 5800 series availability. Instead of wasting your time with a quoted interview, here are bullet points on what Dave had to say when questioned. These comments have been paraphrased, but the meaning has not be taken out of context in any way.
•TSMC is steadily rolling out production of 5800 series GPUs albeit at a slower rate than AMD wishes. There are daily production runs of 5800 series GPUs.
•AMD’s Add-in-Board (AIBs) partners are currently shipping thousands of 5800 series video cards per week on a worldwide basis.
•The number of 5800 series video cards that have been shipped into the channel already is in the very "high tens of thousands."
•While currently there are thousands of video cards shipped on a weekly basis, we will likely see this weekly number reach into the "tens of thousands" come late November or early December. This hinges on whether or not AIBs keep air freighting video cards. The likelihood of air shipments to continue is very high, but AMD does not directly control this.
•Should air freighting continue we are still not going to see "mass widespread availability" by years end, but certainly supply will continue.
•Most of these 5800 video cards are moving into e-tail and retail sales while the great minority are going into OEM sales.
•Expect "well into the hundreds of thousands" of 5800 video cards to be shipped into the channel by year’s end.
•Expect no issues with 5700 stocks.
•TSMC is still having some 40nm production issues, but as you can see from the points listed above, production is not close to a standstill and has ramped up greatly in the last 30 days. TSMC also has new 40nm machines as of September and that capacity is starting to now come online.
•The current mix of 5870 and 5850 cards is running approximately 50/50.