AMD Radeon HD 2900 Pro and GT will be limited run

Posted at: 5:27am 1st October 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

AMD's new chips could be limited to a run of just 10,000 GPUs

AMD’s new Radeon 2900 HD Pro and GT cards will apparently restricted to a limited run, which may only be a few thousand cards. Bill Donnelly from Sapphire confirmed to Custom PC that ‘Sapphire will have these parts available, but they’ll only be in limited numbers.’

However, he was also keen to point out that Sapphire sells millions of graphics cards, so a limited number of cards is still a comparatively large number in the great scheme of things. However, we’ve heard from other sources in the graphics industry that only 10,000 of the chips will be produced, which could mean that only a few hundred make it to the UK.

The Radeon HD 2900 Pro is already available in the UK at a cost of £164.49 from Scan and it has the same number of stream processors as the 2900XT, although the GPU is clocked at 600MHz. Meanwhile, the forthcoming Radeon HD 2900 GT is rumoured to have just 240 stream processors and will cost even less. UK tech site Bit-Tech also claims that the Radeon HD 2900 GT will have a tighter memory 256-bit memory interface than the 512-bit interface found on the 2900XT cards.

Both of the new GPUs are fabricated on the same 80nm process as the Radeon HD 2900XT, so they’re not to be confused with the allegedly forthcoming 65nm parts. The word is that they’re basically 2900XT chips that didn’t quite make the grade, and have thus been clocked lower or had some of their stream processors disabled.

This isn’t the first time that a limited run of GPUs has been produced. Nvidia’s GeForce 7800 GTX 512 was a tweaked version of the 7800 GTX with extra memory, but was also limited to a run of a few thousand cards and was often hard to find.