AMD Renoir shortage

Gaming notebook maker XMG has received confirmation from its original design manufacturer (ODM) that they are currently facing a severe shortage of supply for AMD Ryzen 4000H Renoir processors. The information has been confirmed directly with AMD, and the problem appears to be widespread and affecting the entire industry. What problems is AMD having in supplying processors?

XMG_APEX-15_00_Key con AMD Renoir

 

 

From what XMG has published, orders placed that should be shipped in mid or late August have been delayed until at least the end of September. According to AMD, the orders placed have been assigned and will be delivered, but they also mention that the price of AMD Renoir processors could increase, which is to be expected when supply is less than demand, or in other words, when there is a shortage.

 

Lack of supply will drive up the price of AMD Renoir CPUs

AMD Renoir

You know how this is going, because we have experienced it on numerous occasions before. When there is a lack of supply, the manufacturer raises the prices to make up for the lack of profits, and this ends up having an effect on the price that end users pay for the products.

 

As we said, this information has been confirmed by XMG directly with AMD:

"On July 31 we received an announcement from our ODM that we are facing a serious CPU shortage from AMD in Q3 2020. Large orders that have recently been confirmed to be shipped from our ODM in the middle and end of August are now supposed to be delayed until the end of September.

This is explained by a serious uptick in demand from larger brands and by what we assume bottlenecks in AMD’s production capacities.

Upon receiving this news on Friday (July 31), we reached out to our corporate contacts in AMD who confirmed that this is an industry-wide shortage and there is no way around it. We currently have an order backlog with our ODM on Ryzen 7 4800H of over 1600 units. Both AMD and our ODM have confirmed that our demand has been allocated (meaning: we will get those CPUs), but the goods won’t reach our ODM before End of September."

 

As you can see, in the second paragraph XMG directly says that AMD has bottlenecks in its AMD Renoir processor manufacturing system, which is causing them to be unable to supply current processor demand.

Of course, the company is offering the option to switch to different components, and instead of buying Ryzen 7 4800H, buying the 4600H version, reducing the number of orders or even installing Intel processors.

 

AMD vs Intel from the manufacturers perspective

As you know, the new generation of AMD Renoir processors for laptops coupled with the shortage of Intel processors has made many manufacturers have decided to "switch" to AMD on their computers. The XMG representative who has revealed all this information has also touched on a "sensitive" issue, which is the choice of AMD or Intel processors by the laptop manufacturer itself. These are his words:

"While AMD has all the momentum right now, let's us also not forget the advantages of the Intel platform.

  • Better Gaming performance on average
  • More PCIe lanes for the GPU
  • Slightly better iGPU driver support, because AMD does not include model-specific hotfixes and customizations into the mainline driver. Instead, they "vouch" to release OEM drivers to their partners only every 6 month until... well, until the product is EOL

"

In short, the representative hints that if AMD is not able to meet the demand for processors in the agreed times, manufacturers always have the option of having the Intel option again in their laptops.