AMD’s Navi RX 5700 has reached end-of-life, weeks ahead of RDNA2 launch

According to reports by Cowcotland and Videocardz, AMD’s 7nm RX 5700 graphics card has been discontinued, with no new units being manufactured. This revelation comes just weeks ahead of AMD’s Big Navi launch on October 28th. As the slightly cut-down alternative to AMD’s currently flagship RX 5700XT, we expect Navi22, the partially-enabled variant of Big Navi to fill the RX 5700’s boots.

The reports go on to clarify that rest of the first-gen Navi lineup will still be in production. This means that supplies of the RX 5700 XT, RX 5600 XT, and RX 5500 XT will not be affected. Interestingly, Cowcotland claims that AMD is yet to end-of-life the three-year-old RX 570 and RX 580, which are two entire generations behind the upcoming RDNA2 architecture. 

From the looks of it, AMD will continue to offer both first-gen Navi and Polaris parts as budget and mainstream offerings, at lower price-points than second-gen Navi. The continuing existence of the RX 570 and RX 580 is puzzling, since the Navi RX 5500 XT is the drop-in replacement for both of these cards. As AnandTech hints, it could be due to supply and capacity issues on TSMC’s 7nm process node.