Shortly after ATI's HD 5000 series was launched in late September it became apparent that ATI rushed to squeeze the launch into Q3, to please investors. Basically, there weren't enough GPUs to go around and finding an HD 5870 in stock was tantamount to finding a pig on sale in a Tehran meat market.

Things have improved somewhat, but in certain regions it is still rather hard to find HD 5000 cards in stock. This is especially true of the HD 5850 and HD 5750. It seems cash stripped consumers are deciding to go cheaper, and getting an HD 5850 instead of an HD 5870 will save you €100 with a marginal performance penalty. However, demand for all HD 5000 series seems to be rather healthy and as the Windows 7 launch nears, there's no sign of a let up.

AMD CEO Dirk Meyer confirmed that AMD was unable to meet demand for the new 40nm DirectX 11 cards. "We are hand and mouth on supply. I expect that situation to improve over the coming weeks and months,” said Meyer. There's some questions on whether the supply issue is caused by high demand or some troubles with TSMC's 40nm process, but we suspect demand is to blame. In any case, there's probably not much AMD can do to address the issue in a short time frame, there's no magic wand solution, so it will probably just have to wait it out.

Mind you, AMD can afford to take its time. Nvidia still doesn't have anything to compete with Evergreen and this won't change for weeks if not months, so limited availability probably won't make a dent in Evergreen sales. On the other hand, finding some ham in Tehran will remain a daunting task.

More here.