AMD Radeon 5700 Series and the Perils of Pre-Launch Price Cuts

AMD Radeon 5700 Series and the Perils of Pre-Launch Price Cuts

5 years ago
Anonymous $9jpehmcKty

https://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-5700-series-and-the-perils-of-pre-launch-price-cuts/

In an unusual play at the market, AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) announced on July 5th that they were officially dropping the price of the Radeon RX 5700 Series as it ’embraces competition’.  But, AMD’s Scott Herkelman leads many to believe that the company ‘jebaited’ the competition on July 4th with a cryptic tweet.  There is a bit more going on here than just price cuts that could have an impact all around.  I felt one of the best ways to tackle this topic was to recruit a leading member of our excellent finance division for a bit of a Q&A regarding this from more angles than just anxious fans and the in-the-know consumer, so Adrian joins us today. As such, please remember that this article will also be tagged Finance so ensure to follow the commenting rules. But before we get to the questions we need to look through the back story for a bit of context.

On the subject of whether this was planned or reactive, we’re just going to have to follow the timeline and use a bit of conjecture for this one as I don’t believe we’ll get a 100% answer from anyone on this.   AMD announced the Radeon RX 5700 Series in its entirety during their Next Horizon Gaming Event at E3 this year revealing the Radeon RX 5700 would retail for $379 and compete with the RTX 2060FE while the Radeon RX 5700XT would retail for $449 and compete with the RTX 2070FE.  But, they wouldn’t be without fresh competition as NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) had already teased the new, then still under wraps, SUPER series was coming.   The pricing for the new Navi based Radeon cards garnered mixed responses from audiences, some being okay with the higher than expected pricing due to the performance claims while others going on to coin the newer term AMgreeD.  On July 2nd NVIDIA pulled the curtains on their new SUPER line featuring the RTX 2060 SUPER which brought near RTX 2070 performance and more VRAM to the market for $399, their RTX 2070 SUPER which comes close to the RTX 2080 while adding NVLink SLI support back to the 70 Series for $499, and the still somewhat mysterious RTX 2080 SUPER for $699.  Most every reviewer found the cards in a good price to performance range and found the cards to perform very well.  This led to concerns with the positioning of the upcoming Navi based Radeon RX 5700 Series and their ambitious pricing against their competitor. In comes the shift.  July 4th Scott Herkelman of AMD dropped a cryptic tweet claiming ‘Jebaited’, a term used for the emote on twitch of Alex Jebaily looking confused and also a term the twitch community prefers of the basic ‘baited’.