Reports suggest AMD will be offering only reference design Radeon VII graphics cards at launch and that numbers may be limited. Board partners have tacitly implied that they will not be offering third-party designs at launch, or maybe ever, and that the quantity of Radeon VII is “strictly limited.”

AMD announced Radeon VII over at CES this year. Essentially it’s roughly a Vega gaming GPU shrunk down to the 7nm process node and sprinkled lovingly with 16GB of HBM2 memory. The extra efficiency of the new dense process node allows for greater efficiency and higher clockspeeds, and from somewhere AMD has squeezed Nvidia RTX 2080-level performance despite being a few cores shy of the original Vega 64.

Yet despite this gaming GPU launching on February 7, some of AMD’s board partners have implied they have no custom designs in the works for the “world’s first 7nm gaming GPU”. At this rate, Radeon VII may be following in Vega’s footsteps in more than just silicon – it was a long while before Vega was available in third-party designs, and even then the mining boom largely made these designs redundant.