AMD CEO Lisa Su Thinks Chip Supplies Will Remain “Quite Tight” for All of 2021

[Tsing]

Image: AMD



The supply situation for AMD’s popular Ryzen processors doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as bad as they are for some of its other hardware offerings such as Radeon graphics cards, but AMD President and CEO Lisa Su recently provided remarks that suggest normalization throughout its entire product portfolio could still be many months away. Speaking in an interview with Barron’s, Su acknowledged the effect of the pandemic on the supply and demand balance in the semiconductor sector and stated that things would continue to be “quite tight” for the rest of the year, neglecting to provide any real certainty as to what kind of improvement the industry might see as it heads into 2022. Su confirmed that AMD has been bringing on more capacity every quarter in an effort to meet the unexpected and incredible demand for its products, however...

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[Grimlakin]

Part of the issue with tight supply is directly tied to pent up demand.

 

[Brian_B]

Part of the issue with tight supply is directly tied to pent up demand.

And the other part is that all of AMD's products right now are tied up in a single process node at a single fab...

 

[Zarathustra]

Part of the issue with tight supply is directly tied to pent up demand.

There is that, but there are many other reasons. Demand has been high for crypto, for pandemic upgrades, for the boom in PC gaming, you name it.

And the other part is that all of AMD's products right now are tied up in a single process node at a single fab...

The world is pretty much tied up with a very small number of process nodes in a very small number of fabs.

In the past there were more options. Right now if you want the best process, you need TSMC. Samsung is a runner up, but appear to be struggling. Intel was going to upen up their fabs for third party manufacturing, but that all fell apart when their 10nm process tanked. Global Foundries just decided having a current gen process was too hard, and gave up and decided to stop at 12nm.

Intel will likely come on line again at some point, and TSMC is building additional fabs and expanding capacity, but these things take time and money. Lots of it.

I predict supply for both CPU's and GPU's will remain tight until at least 2023 unless something spectacular happens (economic crash, market upheaval, etc)