AMD to prioritise flagship CPUs over lower end offerings

[DanceswithUnix]

Interesting graph, which says to me that x86 sales are completely dominated by laptops (which I think by now we all knew) which has always been an AMD weakness. I know a few people now with 4000 series APU laptops and they have been really happy with them, but they were quite hard to find. That seems to be changing though, my son sent me a link to an HP asking if it was a decent laptop and it was actually AMD based so visibility must be on the up (he was mostly looking for 16GB of ram, a decent SSD size and battery life). Nice bit of kit presumably on sale with the 5000 series turning up soon, he did end up buying it.

Again, his laptop is 8 core, so I wouldn't class it as low end offering.

[Kovoet]

Think I got my 5900x just at the right time

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Interesting graph, which says to me that x86 sales are completely dominated by laptops (which I think by now we all knew) which has always been an AMD weakness. I know a few people now with 4000 series APU laptops and they have been really happy with them, but they were quite hard to find. That seems to be changing though, my son sent me a link to an HP asking if it was a decent laptop and it was actually AMD based so visibility must be on the up (he was mostly looking for 16GB of ram, a decent SSD size and battery life). Nice bit of kit presumably on sale with the 5000 series turning up soon, he did end up buying it.

Again, his laptop is 8 core, so I wouldn't class it as low end offering.

Its slightly concerning laptops showed a bigger drop!

Recently a mate needed to replace their ancient laptop(last month),and wanted a lighter one,around 13"~14" in size. Basically when they looked by themselves most of the decent options were Intel,and there were sneaky things like many AMD options having worse screens,or only 8GB of RAM. They almost got an Intel laptop until I repeatedly told them they Intel options were only 4C,and the AMD 8C APUs would be much better for some of the stuff they wanted to do,so held off a bit longer.

Luckily Amazon managed to get stock of the Asus Zenbook 14 in the 16GB version for a decent price,and its been a very nice laptop.

[DanceswithUnix]

Luckily Amazon managed to get stock of the Asus Zenbook 14 in the 16GB version for a decent price,and its been a very nice laptop.

Interesting to hear, I was eyeing up the lower end of those for my daughter who would only need it for bashing out school work at A level. Not looked up upgradability though. My son ended up with the Envy 360, which seems quite easy to swap out the NVMe drive and RAM.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Interesting to hear, I was eyeing up the lower end of those for my daughter who would only need it for bashing out school work at A level. Not looked up upgradability though. My son ended up with the Envy 360, which seems quite easy to swap out the NVMe drive and RAM.

They just asked for what sort of specs they should think of going for,so did the searching themselves. I suspect its all soldered(its Asus after all),but I did tell them to make sure they got the most amount of RAM,and storage they could afford. But they were upgrading from a Haswell Core i3 laptop with 4GB of RAM,so it was a 4X increase in thread count and RAM.

But I suppose a 14" laptop in the weight range of 13" ones probably means,sacrifices like that might have been made,to keep size down. I still don't like soldered everything though.

[watercooled]

So if AMD hadn't booked those wafers for console use, would they have booked them for processors? Maybe. TSMC would have perhaps had some slack from the gap left, or by the looks of things it would have already been divided up into lots of other customers. We can't know.

This is kinda what I'm getting at. With the benefit of hindsight, which of course AMD did not have when making long-term strategic decisions and contracts, it's easy to poke holes in the situation. However these contracts would have been signed pre-COVID, and the console wafers were already well into production by the time the massive spike in demand for consumer electronics and processors hit. Going back to the decision-making time, AMD may have known about the additional capacity they had access to, and with their standard models for future shipments they could have booked the estimated capacity for their processors, and then what - left the rest on the table, or book extra capacity for the console manufacturers and make what at the time seemed like an obvious way to make extra profit, even if it was for lower margins.

It is quite obvious from absolute sales figures that AMD have significantly improved their shipments and sales over the past year (and not just in consoles), and therefore did book additional capacity for their non-console business. Looking at market share alone doesn't help much when talking about absolute values.

The criticism is kinda expecting AMD to have predicted there would be a huge surge in demand due to COVID, at a time before COVID was even known about, which is a little unfair. Nvidia and Intel, not relying on TSMC, have been somewhat less restricted in their ability to soak up some market share as AMD are maxed out.

Don't forget AMD have also increased market share in server sales too, which cannot be neglected, especially given the generally higher margins on these parts. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16645...-all-cylinders

I think one of the concerns is after all the signals about AMD abandoning the low end market because they don't have enough capacity (although all dressed up in corporate talk to make it seem that they no longer want that market), is that where Sony's extra wafers suddenly come from?

See above. It's not in AMD's interests to make last-minute amendments which financially harm them, even if such decisions could be made at such short notice. Again, AMD have *increased* client shipments, so they've obviously not cut into their own wafer supply. It is demand that has changed drastically upwards, not supply downwards.

Demand for PS5 is crazy and with the story about Sony being in effect to stingy to specify a larger SoC and then changing the clocks at the last minute once they found out that Microsoft had gone for a larger SoC, has this impacted supplies for other AMD products?

Why would it? It's not AMD's problem if Sony did decide to change final product specifications after the contracts had been signed for production. These contracts are signed well before products hit the shelves - semiconductors like this are long-lead items, you don't just place an order and have them there a week later. Things like shipping clocks and bins *could* be changed at relatively short notice (i.e. maybe several months before release), but like I say, Sony can't move the goal posts and expect AMD to pay the price. Even if the contract with AMD was so one-sided as to be based on working chips, as long as the chips met the original definition of 'working', any adjustments to that are Sony's problem. Even if this change resulted in Sony placing more wafer orders, AMD still didn't have a crystal ball to know they could have used that requested capacity for their own products.

Maybe there actually is more to AMD's story about abandoning the low margin stuff and it's not just about capacity. Maybe to please Wall Street short-termism they want to abandon that market. AMD certainly have past form for crazy stuff like this in that they spend a lot to design and tape out 7nm GPUs (Vega) but then didn't want to sell it. And that's not the first time. With design and tape-out now so expensive, volumes matter a lot and profits are obviously margins * volume. But by concentrating on only margins they have left a lot of profit on the table. The retreat of most 14nm GF CPUs seems a similar thing.

AMD are obviously prioritising the higher-margin products using the silicon they have at hand. Anything else is speculation. The same Zen3 chiplet is used to make all of their current CPUs besides the ones with integrated graphics - why would they intentionally kill their own profits by over-prioritising the lower margin parts for those chiplets? I know some people seem sure that AMD are intentionally harming their own margins, but let's be realistic here. I think people are really thinking too deeply about what is quite a straightforward explanation for the current situation. Applying Occam's Razor is in order IMO.

Regarding 14/12nm, as I said earlier I'm not too sure about that one. It could well be that capacity is being taken up by IOD production, and/or that production of those parts was planned to ramp down anyway, and AMD are uncomfortable with boosting capacity (assuming there is spare volume to do so) of older products given the current market volatility. I.e. they could risk ending up with a surplus if the market changes by the time the products are ready - again, wafer orders are very long-lead nowadays and you have to predict your demand many months in advance, assuming you don't have to join a queue for capacity.

[DanceswithUnix]

But I suppose a 14" laptop in the weight range of 13" ones probably means,sacrifices like that might have been made,to keep size down. I still don't like soldered everything though.

Yeah, I was quite shocked that the HP has socketed ram and storage in the consumer version, though there is a rubber strip that needed carefully removing and replacing to get to some screws. I guess as a 2 in 1 it isn't that thin, but feels nice to handle. The corporate stuff looks *really* easy to upgrade.

[Lisom]

They are labelled Pro due to some additional features, and as still classified as OEM only, but you can buy them from many places. I've used them in everything from A520, B450's, 550's and even a couple in X570's for people who are waiting on GPU's to be come available. The only problems I have had are as you mentioned with some older boards not having the BIOS support, but there are a good few that don't mention support on the CPU list but do in fact work just fine.

[DanceswithUnix]

AMD has announced that it will be prioritizing its flagship CPUs over lower-end offerings, according to the company's new CEO, Rory Read.

Rory Read the new CEO? That would make this late 2011

[Spreadie]

Yeah, out of date copypasta replies appear to be a common theme with this guy.