AMD: Shortages may ease in second half of 2021

One of the less pleasant aspects of a lot of hardware launches of the past year or so has been the inability of companies to get enough volume in the retail channel. In a Q&A session with AMD, CEO Lisa Su answered a question from tech site Hexus about this subject. Basically, it doesn't seem like we should expect shortages to be the new normal during the first half of this year:

Lisa Su - I think it is fair to say that you've seen some reports of substrate shortages, and we also see tightness in the substrate market. This is more a function of that demand has outstripped overall worldwide capacity. We do see more capacity coming online, including AMD investments, but it takes some time get those online. The industry is overall reacting in ensuring that we do put more capacity online, and I expect that to happen through 2021.

We are shipping lots of parts. Manufacturing volumes are continuing to increase across gaming, graphics as well as CPU, and I expect that to happen throughout 2021. I think there will be product tightness, certainly through the first half of this year, but we continue to ship more into our OEM partners as well as our channel partners, to increase overall supply. We completely understand why consumers want more, so supply catch-up is very high up on the priority list.

We're actually not phasing out Radeon 6000 Series MBA (Made By AMD) reference boards for the purpose of trying to ensure that there is extra supply. As stock becomes available, we will offer it on AMD.com at SEP pricing, and we'll encourage our partners to do that as well. I will also say there are some COVID-related logistics and commodity component price increases, and I think some of that is what is blowing through right now.

When queried about why the Ryzen 5000 series laptop processor still feature Vega-based integrated graphics, Su replied that AMD prioritized getting Zen 3-based processor cores to the mobile market. She added that shipping "Cezanne" in early 2021 was very important for AMD and hinted that switching to Navi would have resulted in a later product launch.