I honestly don't know how to feel about this. Of course, this is an area of salt, but according to recent rumors, the primary reason AMD's new Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT (opens in new tab) cards are not circulating in China (opens in new tab) is because the Red Team stuck "Made in Taiwan" on the box They say.

This is entirely appropriate, given that Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing companies are heavily involved in the production of the exciting new chiplet-based RDNA 3 GPUs on AMD's new cards. But for China to refer to a small island off its own coast as anything but "China" is a bit, well, odd.

The main report comes from Videocardz, which references sources from the Chiphell Forum and Bilibilli, talking about availability and "problems on the small island." However, one response to the article's Twitter social (opens in new tab) highlights a potential reason for the failed launch in China.

Whether it was a mistake on AMD's part or a conscious decision to side with their GPU and CPU manufacturing partners in the midst of diplomatic turmoil, I don't know. On the one hand, it is foolish, but on the other hand, it may be admirable.

Or it may not be true at all.

Nor do I know how actual Taiwanese brands like Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte ship their products to China. However, given that most of their graphics cards, laptops, etc. are assembled and packaged in China, we don't necessarily need to worry.

I wrote earlier about Nvidia's rumored price reduction of the RTX 4080 (opens in new tab) due to poor sales, but sources stated that the reduction was not related to AMD's competing RX 7900 series cards, but to increase the number of cards sold. In the report, I mentioned the IgorsLab report (opens in new tab), which states that the Red Team is having problems distributing much of its launch GPU inventory outside of China.

I also mention that one of their sources details some specific driver issues, including memory leaks that are affecting performance and stopping third-party cards from getting out the door and onto store shelves.

However, while reference cards will ship in mid-December, some AIBs may not release their own versions until after the new year.

Given the historical problems of keeping inventory on the shelves to meet launch demand, the consistent problems over the past few years of keeping enough GPUs in the channel, and the current potential problems within China, the next Radeon graphics card launch will be one to watch.

Nevertheless, the new RDNA 3 graphics chips are also to introduce the first innovative chiplet GPU design. These new graphics cards will herald a whole new dawn for Radeon GPUs and, hopefully, a new level of competition against rival Nvidia. In other words, it is the only way to bring down the price of graphics cards.

We have reached out to AMD for comment on these rumors.