AMD admits budget Ryzen CPUs are suffering the most with stock shortages
Higher-end processors are priority over cheap chips right now
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AMD’s processorstock issues – with demand for CPUs exceeding supply, whichwe’ve heard plenty about lately– have led to the company prioritizing higher-end chips, the CEO recently admitted.
This came directly fromAMD’s Lisa Su in a JP Morgan conference call, as reported bySeeking Alpha(viaPC Gamer), in which she observed: “There is some compute that we’re leaving underserviced. I would say, particularly, if you look at some of the segments in the PC market, sort of the lower end of the PC market, we have prioritized some of the higher-end commercial SKUs and gaming SKUs and those kinds of things.”
This is, of course, only good business sense. When supply is tight, and you can’t make enough product to meet overall demands, it’s obviously the best move financially to make the high-end CPUs which command a large profit premium, compared to the budget models with much thinner margins.
Heavyweight bias
Intelhas done exactly the same in the past, and you may recall that when badlyaffected by production issues a couple of years back, the rival chip giant prioritized its heavyweight silicon (many-core and Xeon offerings) rather than lower-end models (or even mid-range to some extent).
Ultimately, both companies are businesses, and they need to make money to keep the silicon fires burning – but that will obviously be little comfort to folks trying tobuild a budget PCand looking for contemporary Ryzen options from Team Red. They’re either very tricky to find, or considerably more costly than their recommended price if you canlocate the CPU you need.
While some cheaper Ryzen CPUs remain thin on the ground, AMD has improved the availability of some of the heftier current-genRyzen 5000chips, as per Su’s comments here, with the likes of theAMD Ryzen 9 5900Xnow beingmore widely available and indeed coming down in pricesomewhat. And better availability still is expected in the near future, at least ifthis report on AMD’s purported revisions for Ryzen 5000 processorsis correct.
GPUs, however, remain a thornier issue and are still extremely difficult to get hold of (but eventhat situation could hopefully changeas 2021 rumbles on).
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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
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