You’ll need thumb and index fingers the size of Hercules’ thigh to pinch enough salt for this one, but it is being claimed that AMD is manufacturing fewer than 5,000 Radeon VII graphics cards. In total. Ever.

This extremely tenuous claim comes by way of Tweaktown, who also claimed a couple of years ago that AMD would have fewer than 16,000 Radeon RX Vega graphics cards available for launch. This actually ended up leading into a delay and AMD denying there was a major shortage, although we’ve got no actual launch shipment figures to confirm whether the rumour was true.

Things are a little bit different for the Vega 2 though, according to this new rumour. Tweaktown has said its ‘industry contacts’ have informed them there’ll be “less than 5000 made.” Jensen, wipe that grin off your face.

The reasoning behind this is that AMD is actually losing money on each graphics card sold and this is just a means to use up the remaining Radeon Instinct MI50 workstation GPU stock. Specs-wise we can see the Radeon VII is a simple repurposing of exactly the same GPU so there’s definitely some sense to this. It did also give something, anything, for AMD to get onstage and shout about after  Nvidia revealed the GeForce RTX 2060.

In addition to this, it’s being reported there will be no custom AIB versions of the Radeon VII. With fewer than 5000 to go around, there just wouldn’t be enough to make it worthwhile getting board partners involved.

If this happens to be true, the Radeon VII would be nothing but a parp in the wind. A token gesture that AMD is still competing at the top-end and a way to grab a few headlines but nothing. That’s a big ‘if’ though.

And despite all this, and despite its power-guzzling ways, the Radeon VII does look like a decently capable video card. It’ll be the fastest gaming graphics card AMD has ever produced. The Radeon VII doubles the memory of the Vega 64, more than doubles the total memory bandwidth up to almost 1TB/s, and improves average gaming performance by 29%.

AMD is due to launch the Radeon VII on February 7th, priced at $699. Time will most definitely tell whether this a load of baloney or a worrying truth.