AMD to prioritise flagship CPUs over lower end offerings

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

https://www.techspot.com/news/89822-...cpus-over.html

TL;DR: The global semiconductor shortage looks to have claimed another victim: AMD's lower-end CPU offerings. Company CEO Lisa Su said the situation is forcing team red to prioritize its higher-end commercial and gaming processors, which are more in demand.

At an investor event earlier this week (via PC Mag), Su was asked whether AMD would be shipping more CPUs if it had extra chip manufacturing capacity. "There is some compute that we're leaving underserviced," she replied. "So, 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."

The desirable Ryzen 5000 line has been one of the more difficult PC components to find at retail since they launched last November. They're also relatively expensive, with the cheapest Ryzen 5 5600X starting at $299.

"Probably the fact that the inventories are very lean throughout the supply chain, and so people are really now focused on, 'Hey, we're not ordering stuff to put it on the shelf, right? We're ordering stuff that end customers want,' and that's how we think about prioritization. Prioritizing sort of the end customer needs as we go forward," Su added.

AMD could be pushing out more CPUs sooner rather than later. The company last week confirmed that it is gradually transitioning the AMD Ryzen 5000 series desktop processors to a 'B2' revision over the next six months. These won't offer any noticeable changes compared to the current chips on the B0 stepping—it was initially thought they could be an XT refresh—but they might feature slight adjustments that improve yields, helping increase supply. Su said AMD hopes to add more manufacturing capacity over the “next couple of months.”

So what does that mean for the under £200~£250 market?? It might explain why the cheapest Zen3 CPUs are £250+ and why only old models are still available under this. Its a tad concerning because as AMD moves over more Zen2 wafers to Zen3,what are they are going to sell in these price points??

The AMD APUs use more 7NM sillicon too(150mm2~180mm2 vs 70mm2~80mm2),so I can't see them turning up anytime soon!

Also its going to be quite weird if Intel becomes the value champion and AMD becomes the expensive enthusiast choice.

[cptwhite_uk]

Aren't Intel already the value proposition? 10100F / 10400F etc?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Aren't Intel already the value proposition? 10100F / 10400F etc?

Sadly a number of AMD fans can't see this,and I see them on a few forums jumping on Hardware Unboxed criticising some budget B560 motherboards,to push the Ryzen 5 5600X as the "value" option.

Its ironic how things have flipped around(people saying the faster Core i5 10600K wasn't worth it because the slower Ryzen 5 3600 was cheaper).

[watercooled]

It's an understandable response to the current market. AMD are effectively wafer-limited at this point, and where the cheaper CPUs are based on the same silicon as more expensive ones, they'd have to sell dies suitable for high-end as low-end parts to feed that part of the market. It's why it also makes sense for AMD to prioritise CPU chiplets over GPUs as they're far more profitable per die area. It also hints at the Zen3 chiplets yielding quite well as, if they had a ton of dies with only 4 usable cores, they would probably still sell well in the current market. Provided they could get enough IO dies from GloFo and substrates to make them into saleable CPUs of course...

The last-gen APUs on 14/12nm seem permanently out of stock at retail too though, which makes me wonder what the situation is like on that node. However, AMD probably prioritising the more lucrative laptop market there at the moment too. Gaining as much laptop market share as possible given this opportunity is likely at least as important as the sales themselves!

Intel as it happens, don't seem to be wafer limited at the moment, so can afford to sell into the lower MSRP market without eating into their profits.

It's just an anomaly of the current weird situation with AMD selling every processor they can produce, and they're obviously trying to make as much profit as they can in the process.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AMD engineered this problem.AMD has pushed most of its 7NM wafers to consoles which are lower margin:
https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amd-us...months-approx/

Out of 110000 7NM wafers,90000 went to consoles. AMD was also given extra capacity from TSMC when Huawei was booted off TSMC. They didn't expect this windfall in wafer allocations!

So basically they knew very well even in 2019/2020 that there wouldn't be enough capacity. This is why Zen3 cost more,because AMD wants to offset its console margins with higher margin products. This is probably why you don't find a lot of 12NM/14NM products now,as they probably consider these lower margins and are not interested in making too many of them.

The issue here,is by allocating 80% of their 7NM capacity to consoles,they have probably lost a ton of revenue there.

In the end its seen in marketshare - AMD is loosing both CPU/GPU share as Intel/Nvidia can supply more. At this point once the Zen2 contracts are finished,and more production is moved over to Zen3,I can't see AMD being of any significance under the £200~£250 market anymore. The APUs are 150MM2~180MM2 and are twice the size of the 7NM Zen3 chiplets.

Its happening with GPUs too,as its quite clear AMD is utterly non-comepetitive in price/performance,and you have a much greater chance of getting a Nvidia GPU at RRP.

Also consoles,laptops,etc are lower margin markets - OEMs won't be paying top dollar for the parts. Basically AMD has copied Apple,and have targetted lower DIY sales at higher margins.

AMD have to be very careful here - they are giving Intel/Nvidia space to breath. I really hope giving 80% of their 7NM capacity to lower margin consoles won't come to bite them in the arse!

[watercooled]

There are rumours and speculation, but it's still not entirely clear whose say it is regarding console wafer allocation i.e. whether they come from AMD's allocation or are handled separately by TSMC (i.e. MS/Sony could be contracting them directly). You have to assume AMD deliberately intended to harm their own margins to over-allocate to console supply, which doesn't make much sense. Console wafers are also fairly long-lead orders placed well in advance by the manufacturers.

I find it quite hard to believe close to 90% of AMD's total wafer allocation went to consoles when you consider Ryzen, EPYC and the GPUs (the latter of which admittedly don't seem very high volume, but presumably for the same reason that over-allocating to consoles doesn't make much sense - chiplets are just more profitable in this wafer-bound situation). That article completely ignores EPYC production, which incidentally uses the same silicon as the Ryzen CPUs. Add into that only part of the silicon comes from TSMC, and even if the figures are *technically* correct, it's far from the whole story. No doubt though, the consoles are consuming a lot of TSMC's 7nm capacity at present! It makes you wonder what the GPU market might look like now if the consoles had not been released when they were. 90k wafers is a lot of GPUs! But then again, they would have to be careful producing that many anyway, with how explosively volatile the crypto market is. We all know what happened last time...

I'm not sure if you're suggesting AMD are intentionally limiting supply of 12/14nm products? Again I'm not sure that makes a great deal of sense when they're literally selling everything they can make. They might be hesitant to raise orders and risk ending up with a backlog of last-gen products, but it could also be down to the IO dies consuming a significant part of that allocation. 14/12nm products are obviously going to be lower ASP vs the newest Zen3 SKUs but they're also quite cheap to make and should be yielding very well at this point. For the current market, they're still flying off the shelves.

Either way, I think something to come out of this is showing that going the chiplet route seems to have been an incredibly fortuitous engineering decision made by AMD. Even with limited wafer allocation they can supply huge quantities of chiplets and at very high yields.

Console/laptops may be lower margin, but they're also a very lucrative and stable market. You know as well as I do how hard it has been for AMD to gain some foothold back into the mobile market even when they've had competitive products in the past. Increasing their market share there is worth more than just the instantaneous profit margins. Regarding GPUs, it kinda makes sense that they're probably the lowest priority parts that AMD are producing on 7nm at the moment - they are huge dies at relatively lower yields vs the Zen3 chiplets, so with a limited wafer capacity they wouldn't want to be producing more at the cost of displacing many times the volume of Zen3 chiplets.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

There is lots of information showing AMD got more supply than they expected last year,and the consoles are eating up a huge amount of 7NM allocation:
https://translate.google.com/transla...ch/375133.html

In the fourth quarter, the total wafer shipments of the two game console processors were close to 120,000 pieces.

From this article they said AMD secured 150000 wafers from TSMC at the same time:
https://www.hardwareheaven.com/amd-8...-for-consoles/

So that is a total of 30000 left for everything else. The article I linked preivously talked about the last quarter.

AMD put in even more 7NM orders late last year just for consoles:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMD_Stock/c...order_at_tsmc/

Apparently yields were not as high as expected. If you go by previous AMD contracts they had to deliver the fully working SOCs,so were responsible for producing them and selling the final product for MS/Sony to package IIRC.

AMD no doubt overpromised on the amount of console SOCs they could deliver,and then when yields were not good enough had to push more and more wafers towards the consoles. They made a huge mistake.

Then to offset that,they starting increasing the prices of their newer stuff to compensate. Its not like a Zen3 chiplet costs much more than a Zen2 chiplet(only a few mm2 bigger).

Its also quite clear AMD hasn't pushed as much 12NM/14NM production - it can be seen by the fact its very hard to find 12NM/14NM AMD products of any sort and its much lower margin because they have to sell at a lower price anyway. AMD like a lot of tech firms,is more concerned by increasng its margins as much as possible. Its even more important than revenue or profits.

Over the last 12 months,its been very hard to find even Athlons or many of the 12NM/14NM APUs anywhere. Yet the Intel 14NM CPUs have been much easier to find. 12NM/14NM phone SOCs have not had many issues either - AMD is probably the biggest customer for GF 12/14NM and the WSA gives them exclusivity.

Even their article in the OP belies the fact,they have increasingly less interest in lower margin markets. GF has enough capacity to supply lower end 12NM/14NM products,but AMD obviously has no interest in them. The 7NM products by comparison are very high margin - you are talking £250~£300 for a 70MM2 piece of 7NM sillicon and a slightly bigger 12NM/14NM I/O die.

This is the same model Apple does,and everyone wants to copy. It means entry level/mainstream markets for many products are being abandoned. Its happening everywhere with companies in Europe/US.Just see what has happened in phones with more Chinese companies coming and serving that market. The same with so many appliances too.

AMD is no doubt quite happy to let Intel take it - if they were not,they would have pushed through more 12NM/14NM orders.

[watercooled]

I'm not disputing the increased wafer availability part, but you also have to remember that AMD nearly doubled their year on year sales, beating Nvidia percentage-wise, while Intel actually decreased. They might have predicted an increase in sales but I don't think many could have predicted the scale of the increase we have seen in semiconductor sales over the past year, nor the shortages they have led to. https://www.techspot.com/news/89825-...imbs-11th.html

I understand the wafer numbers, and I'm not being deliberately obtuse, but you have to acknowledge error bars on the numbers published by various websites. Also be careful of adding 2 and 2 to get 3 - we can't be certain, like I say, whether various publications are including console sales in AMD's allocations or treating them separately. You could stack them and still be well within TSMC's capabilities, given the error bars we have to assume over other customers' orders. Remember EPYC sales consume a ton of chiplets, and the calculations presented by some websites barely allow a few wafers for those products. Some totally fail to acknowledge EPYC's existence but still somehow add up to 100% of AMD's available wafer capacity with their estimates. EPYC has seen some really impressive volumes in its latest iteration.

I'm also not sure the current AMD would be naïve enough to make a mistake of the magnitude you're implying. Yet other rumours suggest Sony may have reduced yields by increasing clock speeds at the 11th hour - that's not AMD's problem even if the initial contracts were directly with AMD for working dies. But again, we don't know if AMD even have any involvement with the production chain now. I could be wrong but I don't recall seeing anything conclusively stating that Sony/MS aren't contracting TSMC directly as the manufacturer, with AMD acting as the design contractor whose job is effectively finished now. Why would AMD want to take on the risk of the foundry's yields, i.e. AMD taking all the risk between TSMC and Sony/MS. It may be the case, but it smells off to me. The processors are Sony/MS products at the end of the day, but with AMD IP and engineering. By the same token, I can't see AMD taking the risk when Samsung LSI start producing their processors with integrated AMD graphics IP at Samsung Foundry.

The pricing of Zen3 is largely a result of its market positioning. Outperforming Intel at lower power consumption almost across the board doesn't give them much inventive to undercut them when they can't produce enough to meet demand in the first place. They did, however, succeed in applying pricing pressure on Intel's latest CPUs. Retail pricing has little correlation with die size when other factors are in play. If they had capacity to spare, perhaps they would be trying to further eat into Intel's market share by introducing the hypothetical 5700X for instance, but there's really no motivation for them to do that right now. They don't have any extra capacity, so they need to make as much profit as they can, with the products they are able to produce.

I have noticed the lack of 12/14nm APUs but wonder how much of that is just down to increased demand as we have seen throughout the sector. I can't see them intentionally *not* producing anything in those price ranges and leaving Intel to soak up the profits. Another thing to consider is the APUs have fairly competent graphics performance, which makes them quite attractive given the current ridiculous GPU market situation. They haven't even released the 7nm APUs to retail, I expect due to wafer capacity.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AMD have done this before when they were last ahead. During the days of the Athlon 64,they kind of ignored entry level/mainstream markets,so much so that Intel had better value products in those segments. I still remember my 1st dual core was the Pentium D805.

AMD has made tons of similar mistakes before - plenty of instances when they over estimated capacity,and were left with lots of spare stock to sell(both CPUs and GPUs),and other scenarios where they did the opposite. Its one of the issues with being fabless. Plus its starting to bite them in the arse - they have lost marketshare in both CPU/GPU over the last six months. Its far easier to find Intel/Nvidia CPU/GPU products at RRP.

In the end they decided to launch 3 7NM products at once - 3 consoles,a whole new CPU line and a new line of GPUs. They had been given a huge amount of spare 7NM capacity which Huawei had. The reality was no one forced them to launch all 3 products at once. They could have easily staggered the launches over a longer period.

As shown late last year,AMD had to add extra capacity for consoles. With the previous consoles,AMD was responsible for delivering the final SOC to MS/Sony who then sent it for packaging. Plus I don't buy Sony changed the specs - AMD itself designed the SOC,so would have told Sony it was capable of doing X clockspeeds. Its more likely because these SOCs are between 300~360MM2 in size,that AMD overestimated yields. It only takes one part not to hit what AMD promised to mean you have junk silicon. The yield rates were said to be under 60% or thereabouts.

In the end AMD,pushed too much of its 7NM capacity towards consoles willingly. They didn't have a backup plan to keep 12NM/14NM products going in sufficient volume. So in the end this is a shortage of their making. Nvidia OTH did,so why AMD GPUs are virtually absent from most OEM systems now.

To put in context its quite clear Nvidia has sold far more Ampere GPUs(especially if you consider mining GPUs won't show up on Steam). AMD is actually at under 20% sales marketshare now. Nvidia despite a "shortage" and poor 8NM yields,is increasing marketshare. Nvidia has 8NM products easily available in laptops and desktops. Where is AMD??

Even Nvidia 14NM/12NM GPUs can be had in laptops and desktops now. Turing based products like the GTX1660 series can be bought now in laptop and prebuilt systems. Yet can you see any AMD 12NM/14NM GPUs anywhere in volume in laptops or desktops?? Polaris is barely nowhere to be seen - Ampere is still easily available in prebuilt desktops and laptops. Nvidia is laughing at both ends of the market.

So one has to question if they hadn't overpromised on consoles,how much more they could have made in revenue.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Seems like AMD is making another console:
https://videocardz.com/newz/valve-st...eature-amd-apu

Shame we can't even get 7NM APUs easily at retail!

[DanceswithUnix]

There is lots of information showing AMD got more supply than they expected last year,and the consoles are eating up a huge amount of 7NM allocation:

AMD Don't have a fixed slice of the TSMC pie, they have to book wafers long in advance. They booked a lot of wafers for the consoles because they predicted demand for them (or more likely, that was the order book from MS & Sony).

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.

For all the complaints I hear I'm not sure I understand what people are asking for either. Should AMD have never taken on the MS and Sony contracts? That seems to have obvious downsides in AMD technology adoption, I've seen plenty of people saying "these things are in the XBox/PS5 so they must be OK". Or should AMD have failed to deliver on those contracts and probably been sued for huge penalties?

On the upside, the PS5 is a cracking console. Not tried the XBox.

Oh, I also wonder just how much this has to do with the customer. AMD are probably trying to built a warchest right now for when Intel can come back swinging. It could just be a corporate defensive strategy.

[kompukare]

AMD Don't have a fixed slice of the TSMC pie, they have to book wafers long in advance. They booked a lot of wafers for the consoles because they predicted demand for them (or more likely, that was the order book from MS & Sony).

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?

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?

Plus Cat's speculation that AMD only gets paid for chips which meet the new spec which would be crazily bad one-sided supply contract.

If PS5 SoC yields are as low as 60% despite the defect rate and die size expecting it to be closer to 75% then 'they' (unsure whether Sony or AMD) have 25% of PS5 chips which are functional but can't be binned to meet the PS5 specs. That's a colossal waste especially with the current shortages of everything.

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.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AMD Don't have a fixed slice of the TSMC pie, they have to book wafers long in advance. They booked a lot of wafers for the consoles because they predicted demand for them (or more likely, that was the order book from MS & Sony).

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.

For all the complaints I hear I'm not sure I understand what people are asking for either. Should AMD have never taken on the MS and Sony contracts? That seems to have obvious downsides in AMD technology adoption, I've seen plenty of people saying "these things are in the XBox/PS5 so they must be OK". Or should AMD have failed to deliver on those contracts and probably been sued for huge penalties?

On the upside, the PS5 is a cracking console. Not tried the XBox.

Oh, I also wonder just how much this has to do with the customer. AMD are probably trying to built a warchest right now for when Intel can come back swinging. It could just be a corporate defensive strategy.

Huawei was booted off,so Taiwanese tech news had said they pushed more capacity after summer 2020. In the end AMD made the decision and its their fault for prioritising lowish margin businesses.

Nobody forced them to launch 3 consoles,and then at the same time then launch 2 series of Zen3 CPUs,and a new generation of GPUs at the same time,then wind down 12NM/14NM production. Nvidia do this,as there is enough supply of 12NM/14NM in prebuilt systems and laptops. I can go and order such a system right now.

Now AMD is saying they have no 7NM supply,and then rumours say they have another console,ie,the Valve Steampal.

These are all conscious decisions - also if AMD said we can only supply X amount of consoles,due to wafer supply what are Sony/MS going to do? Go to Intel or Nvidia,who have their own limitations too,and would want much higher margins. Have we all forgotten the spat between MS and Nvidia?

To requote a post I made elsewhere:

CPUs are apparently not a low margin businesses - Intel who makes ridiculous amounts of money despite spend billions of USD on their fabs,and various billions on weird purchases,etc. Intel still has higher margins than AMD despite having to sell their 14NM+++++++++++++++++++++++ CPUs for less and less money.

Its most likely even a £250 CPU is higher margin than people think. For one thing its only 70MM2 of 7NM silicon with very high yields. They are also salvaged parts,ie,lower clocking chiplets with defective cores. Then consider that the same chiplets will be found in Epyc/Threadripper so the parts which filter down to that level are really "poor quality" in comparison. The 7NM APUs are 150MM2~180MM2 and are found in £350~£400 desktops and £400~£500 laptops. The consoles are somewhat different - the parts have some redundancy built in,but anything with sufficient defects is unusuable. With GPUs,there is loads of salvage SKUs to take up faulty parts. With consoles that doesn't really exist.To put it in context,the console APUs are around 300MM2~360MM2 in size. These are around the same size as a GPU in the RX6700XT or RTX3070TI. AMD due to shortages has lost dGPU sales relative to Nvidia!


Now look at their last financials. AMD made $485M on $2100M of computing and graphics sales(23%). They made $277M on $1345M(20%) of semi-custom and enterprise sales. Yet AMD in 9 months has almost doubled its enterprise sales. So if you take enterprise sales out of it,which are very high margins,its quite clear even with a huge increase in semi-custom consoles sales/licensing its lower margin than their client side of the business.


Plus Intel makes a ton of money from OEM sales. Nvidia made around $5 billion. Half of that was from "gaming" GPUs,and they still ship significant volumes of older 12NM/14NM parts. At least 14 million consoles have sold over two quarters(in Q4 2019 they sold only 2 million GPUs). Yet despite this computing and graphics has made $4 billion in revenue with $1.05 billion in income,yet semi-custom and enterprise made $2.6 billion and $520 million in income. There is a reason why AMD lumped in enterprise and semi-custom into one segment,because it hides the relatively low margins console contracts make relative to enterprise,and client CPU/GPU sales.Its why Nvidia and MS fell out,as MS pushed hard on Nvidia WRT to costs.

AMD needs to balance the different parts of the business,,they have potentially left a ton of revenue on the side,if now they have to leave whole profitable market segments,especially during a pandemic which drove forward a lot of PC purchases. If they didn't need to abandon parts of their business,then it wouldn't be an issue. I really hope AMD finds a way to get more supply to its PC business. Sadly its giving Intel and Nvidia more of respite than they deserve,to come back later when they are stronger.

Semi-custom and enterprise made only $1 billion more last quarter despite a doubling of enterprise server sales and the consoles. Yet despite servers being lumped into it,its still lower margin than client which has tons of OEM sales. Those OEM sales are most likely lower margin than DIY sales. After all you can get prebuilt desktop/laptops with 150MM2 7NM APUs for as low as £350. So I really doubt a £200 Ryzen 5 is going to be lower margin than that!

The thing is enterprise sales are much higher volume than a year ago,and AMD sold over 14 million PS5/XBox Series X consoles,plus the XBox Series S. They only managed to sell 1 million Zen3 CPUs in the last quarter of 2020,and at best sell around 2 million GPUs a quarter(Nvidia nearly 5X that). Intel and Nvidia are far more exposed to mainstream sales as they sell a much bigger number of mainstream GPUs and CPUs,yet they make more revenue and higher margins.

So the problem here,is AMD is throwing away far too many wafers on consoles - over 14 million Navi22/GA104 sized dies,when AMD has probably sold less Zen3 and GPUs during the last 2 quarters is a disaster.

Plus even if Sony/MS helped AMD get allocations,the issue here it does mean AMD can't expand either.

Also its even a bigger disaster when its quite clear AMD CPU/GPU share is now starting to decrease or plateau meaning they have to drop whole lines.

First its entry level/mainstream,then see how Zen3 based TR is nowhere to be seen,etc.

Plus they are doing this during the height of the pandemic. Companies and consumers are pushing forward PC and server upgrades. Is this level of demand going to last until next year - most people I know who upgrade now,won't be changing stuff out for a few more years,as will most companies. So the problem here is Intel/Nvidia are benefiting from AMD not being able to make more supply.

Making more supply for MS/Sony benefits them far more.

To show you how bad AMD supply is - some of my mates in academia and elsewhere,etc have had local clusters/servers upgraded at their institutions and they ended up being Intel,because the AMD options are harder to find(or there are less of them).

This means consoles are starting to affect both extremes of the market at the wrong time.

Then what happens at 5NM/6NM?? Intel and Nvidia this time have made sure they get in early unlike 7NM. So if AMD has less 5NM/6NM volume,what happens if they promised die shrinks as part of the process??

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?

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?

Plus Cat's speculation that AMD only gets paid for chips which meet the new spec which would be crazily bad one-sided supply contract.

If PS5 SoC yields are as low as 60% despite the defect rate and die size expecting it to be closer to 75% then 'they' (unsure whether Sony or AMD) have 25% of PS5 chips which are functional but can't be binned to meet the PS5 specs. That's a colossal waste especially with the current shortages of everything.

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.

The thing is that its definitely AMD booking the extra capacity,as AMD is one of the leading users of TSMC. Yet companies such as Nvidia which sell a huge ton of massive GPU chips,seem to shipped far more GPU chips than AMD leveraged across both TSMC and Samsung. People forget the 12NM/14NM Turing GPUs being sold today are made by TSMC.

Yet AMD increases supply to record levels,yet is having far more issues than Intel/Nvidia in providing volume to customers,such that both are taking more sales share.

There was a lot of implication AMD was providing finished chips the last time around.

But lets do a logical argument to see if this is still true.

Now if AMD was doing licensing,then they wouldn't be booking capacity for consoles - MS/Sony would need to handle it like Apple. Yet there is no indication MS/Sony have huge 7NM contracts in place.

So what if AMD is contracted to supply wafers for MS/Sony partners to finish?? That would be a contract for X amount of wafers supplied to MS/Sony. AMD would be under no obligation to provide any extra wafers,especially if it meant they had to wind down supply of other products,ie,GPUs for example.

However,if AMD has to supply the final chips,it means the contract is for X chips. That means it would be on AMD to deliver,even if they have to use their own wafer allocations to meet the contract numbers.

Now,what seems more likely if we see the information in front of us,what does look most likely?? Its weird one of the largest(if not soon to be the largest) customer of TSMC 7NM is now unable to supply who sections of the PC market properly,and is now finding it harder to expand sales.

As shown in the charts abover,AMD sales share is now plateauing or decreasing in almost all consumer segments. The competitors are increasing their share,despite operating under the same market conditions. Samsung 8NM is also in a much worse condition than TSMC 7NM,and Nvidia has much larger dies too yet they appear to be shipping much more of Ampere.

[DanceswithUnix]

Then what happens at 5NM/6NM?? Intel and Nvidia this time have made sure they get in early unlike 7NM. So if AMD has less 5NM/6NM volume,what happens if they promised die shrinks as part of the process??

That's a whole new prediction that AMD has had to have made, trial invariant with this one. It is also by now probably locked in to some extent given the timescales involved in chip manufacture.

As for the rest of your post, I'm sorry and this is not a poke at you personally but I'm kind of bored of hearing the same 20/20 hindsight stuff about contracts that AMD will have signed *years* ago with MS and Sony. Customers want tons of silicon available at release date. That will have been known and planned up front.

Right now I can buy a 3600 for my lowish end machines at a slightly high but sane £170 for delivery tomorrow from plenty of sources. I can easily get a 5600 for £250, cheaper than the RRP I had to hunt for some months ago. It is even currently possible to buy a 5950X for money that makes me wonder if I should get some upgrades here at work. GPUs are still a problem, unless you want to spend £700 on a 6700 XT or £1500 on a GTX 3090 in which case fill yer boots.

Low end? There aren't any 2 or 4 core APUs. This is where AMD really shot themselves in the foot because none of the shipping chipsets support the 3400G let alone the Athlon 3000g so they can't fill orders with 12nm parts (400 series boards seem to be drying up now). But I'm guessing that's not what you are thinking of as low end.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

That's a whole new prediction that AMD has had to have made, trial invariant with this one. It is also by now probably locked in to some extent given the timescales involved in chip manufacture.

As for the rest of your post, I'm sorry and this is not a poke at you personally but I'm kind of bored of hearing the same 20/20 hindsight stuff about contracts that AMD will have signed *years* ago with MS and Sony. Customers want tons of silicon available at release date. That will have been known and planned up front.

Right now I can buy a 3600 for my lowish end machines at a slightly high but sane £170 for delivery tomorrow from plenty of sources. I can easily get a 5600 for £250, cheaper than the RRP I had to hunt for some months ago. It is even currently possible to buy a 5950X for money that makes me wonder if I should get some upgrades here at work. GPUs are still a problem, unless you want to spend £700 on a 6700 XT or £1500 on a GTX 3090 in which case fill yer boots.

Low end? There aren't any 2 or 4 core APUs. This is where AMD really shot themselves in the foot because none of the shipping chipsets support the 3400G let alone the Athlon 3000g so they can't fill orders with 12nm parts (400 series boards seem to be drying up now). But I'm guessing that's not what you are thinking of as low end.

Yet for most of the last year,Intel and Nvidia products were much easier to get. Yet look at prebuilt systems,Intel swamps AMD in laptops. AMD dGPUs are harder to find in prebuilts than in 2019. How much of those shortages were because AMD was already making console SOCs and couldn't push up production? Now AMD admits its going to get worse. How much revenue have they lost from this?

Sorry but was it 20/20 when they transferred even more wafers in late 2020 to consoles during the height of pandemic?? Its also not hindsight to launch 3 consoles,two ranges of CPUs and a GPU range in a six month period together. Then power down 12NM/14NM GPU production,but Nvidia had the foresight not to so?? Intel and Nvidia are under the same allocation pressures. The CPU/GPU roadmaps are also planned ahead too,and AMD has to plan years ahead in advance to allocate wafers for them. Are people saying AMD has such a chronic lack of confidence in their own products,they would rather sell more consoles,than their own products??

Nvidia literally misstepped with TSMC,and yet come out of this smelling of roses. So I am frankly fedup of all the misplaced sympathy for AMD. Where are all the AMD fans now,who mocked and laughed at Nvidia for making the "world's worst decision" going with an "unproven" Samsung 8NM node?? Even I thought Nvidia had screwed up and AMD had scored a direct hit. I thought Intel was screwed after RKL was another 14NM++++++++++ special,and Intel should surely go down the drain. But,NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO,this is AMD,clutching defeat from the jaws of victory since 1969.

All the fans laughing at Intel's misfortune? Yet now AMD is loosing marketshare in desktop and mobile,despite Intel being behind in most aspects.AMD still makes lower margins than both companies,who are more exposed to mainstream markets. You can't make it up.Yet,all their competitors despite the same market conditions have shown more hindsight. They are shipping more products. That means as businesses they are doing simply better.

Its worth looking at this video from Ian Cutress:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaB1WuFUAtw



Intel is now moving to a much more agile way of making its cores,to be process node independent.

What is AMD doing?? Going backwards. Chiplets are their one big claim to fame,until Intel/Nvidia goes that way and will probably do it better(eventually). Here their own competitors are making backup plans so they can even backport cores.

Backup plan with AMD? What backup plan.





BuT wE sHiPpEd MoRe CoNsOlEs RiGhT? At the height of the Athlon 64 they had 50% consumer PC sales share and 25% of the server market. They are nowhere near that and ran out of steam already.

Too many here poke fun at Intel/Nvidia who have had to make far more risky decisions,but since AMD is the "poor underdog" they have repeatedly screwed up and everyone gives them a pass. None of their competitors get the same pass as AMD does.

Year after year,they screwup some way,and then its always "not their fault".

[[GSV]Trig]

Aren't Intel already the value proposition? 10100F / 10400F etc?

On a new build its fine, however I'm sat with a 1600AF, so nothing Intel works for me, I was looking at the 5600X next, but that's very much costs based as there are other things I need to spend money on at the mo.