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An interview with AMD CEO, Lisa Su, on Barron’s, echoes what we’ve been hearing elsewhere in the industry—the current silicon shortage will continue to impact supply at least until the end of the year. The interview also goes into the effect the Covid-19 pandemic has had on the company as well as touching on AMD’s plans after its $35B acquisition of Xilinx.
The standout part of the interview for PC gamers though is to do with those squeezed supply chains. Lisa Su states that over the last 12 months, “demand has far exceeded even our aggressive expectations.”
This is something we’ve all felt the impact of, with graphics cards essentially being impossible to buy and CPUs being difficult to get your hands on over the holiday period. Although, thankfully you should be able to get your hands on AMD’s Ryzen 5000-series CPUs now.
This scarcity of chips is set to continue though, “for this year, it’s going to continue to be quite tight.” That’s probably not something any of us wants to hear, although the AMD CEO did state that the company was, “bringing on more capacity every quarter.”
We have started to see graphics card pricing begin to return to normal levels, with cards in Germany dropping from a high of 304% down to 153% of the MSRP. That’s clearly far too expensive still, but it’s a sign that things are moving in the right direction.
China has been cracking down on cryptocurrency mining in some provinces too, which has lead to used graphics cards flooding the markets. Although these are generally sold in bulk, and you’d probably want to show caution around any card that has been slaving away 24/7 for the best part of a year.
Maybe we will see some of AMD’s graphics cards out in the wild at reasonable prices in the not too distant future after all. Especially as the latest rumours have its Radeon RX 6600 XT and RX 6600 GPUs expected to launch this August.
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