AMD didn’t get that many Radeon HD 7970 cards to retail and at this point it looks that only few thousand units made it to the worldwide market.

AMD wanted to create buzz and start selling these to some most loyal customers, probably to please investors. Launching samples and making benchmarks available around Christmas was a good way to say that the cards started shipping in Q4 2011.

We hear that more cards are coming in late January, so roughly in two weeks from now. It will happen in middle of Chinese New Year, but this can only mean that the cards will be produced and shipped before the year of the dragon, January 23rd 2012.

Since Kepler won’t show its face this quarter, it looks like AMD still has plenty of time to ramp up production and get this sales numbers up.