AMD: 80% of production reserved for consoles

Nvidia has been under a lot of pressure regarding her availability problems, AMD is lucky enough to arrive after the storm to be almost under the radar…

RX 6000 cards are invisible

The fact remains that we have all found that the launch of RDNA2 is just ghostly. There are no cards available in either reference design or custom manufacturing. The quantities delivered by AMD’s partner brands are even lower than those of its competitor…quite a performance.

The Ryzen 5000: a rare commodity

For those who want to bet on a new processor, here again the situation is problematic. The Ryzen 5000 processors are hard to find, while their big brothers in the 3000 series are victims of high price inflation. Obviously, for the end customers, this situation is lamentable. However, professionals seem to have anticipated the situation much more for AMD products than for Nvidia. One of the biggest French players in distribution explains that AMD was very clear about the situation at the end of the year: “From the beginning of the summer we knew that the next Radeons would not really be available until 2021. Concerning the Vermeers, AMD had told us directly that the CPUs would all be under allocation”.

By late spring, distributors knew that AMD products would be in short supply

AMD therefore knew precisely that its 2021 launches would create frustration among end customers even though it had informed its partners in advance. The reason is therefore not the same as for Nvidia. AMD simply had to manage as well as possible a large contract which enabled it to survive for years… the supply of game consoles.

80% of the wafers went to the chips of the consoles

AMD had secured a production of 150,000 7nm wafers at TSMC. The first production batch of 80,000 wafers went to the PS5, which AMD handled first. The second batch, 40,000 wafers, went to the Xbox. Microsoft having delayed the production of its console as long as possible to benefit from the latest technologies of the reds, notably RDNA 2. With the remaining 20% of wafers, AMD had to take care of producing its Ryzen 5000 and RX 6000…While continuing to produce Ryzen 3000 and managing its entry into the laptop market. AMD has therefore clearly favored its production of chips dedicated to consoles due to particularly firm contractual commitments with the giants Sony and Microsoft. It should be said that AMD was probably counting on being able to request a few additional places at TSMC in case of…

2020 is a record year for TSMC but a lot of questions in perspective

The health crisis decided otherwise by disrupting supply chains and paradoxically exploding demand for PCs. Thus TSMC, which had to find itself with available places in its production following the “blacklisting” of Huawei, found itself overwhelmed by demand. TSMC should thus close the year having sold nearly 150,000 5nm wafers to Apple. The foundry also saw an explosion in demand for the Nvidia Tegra X1 SoCs used for the Nintendo Switch… the year 2020 promises to be exceptional for the Taiwanese group but many of its partners must now start to seriously question themselves.