AMD Vows to Resolve GPU Shortage: We Are Ramping Production

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By Anton Shilov
published

More Radeons incoming.

AMD
(Image credit: AMD)

Last year, AMD finally released a family of graphics processors that can compete against Nvidia's high-end offerings in terms of performance. Unfortunately, AMD could not meet demand for new GPUs. But apparently there is light at the end of the tunnel as AMD is ramping up production.

"We introduced our Radeon 6700 XT desktop CPU with leadership 1440p gaming performance in March, and are on track for the first notebooks featuring our leading edge mobile RDNA 2 architecture to launch later this quarter," said Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, during the company's latest earnings call. "We expect Radeon 6000 series GPU sales to grow significantly over the coming quarters as we ramp production." 

Increasing GPU supply is not a particularly easy task. AMD's manufacturing partner TSMC operates at a nearly 100% load. Furthermore, production cycle of a modern process is around three months long, so a chip AMD orders today may not be shipped until sometime this summer.

"We see good customer ordering patterns and strong backlog," said Su. "Then, we have also seen that the supply chain has been tight overall for the semiconductor industry. And we’ve been working very closely with our supply chain partners. So, we also have good visibility to additional supply as we go throughout the year."

AMD's graphics revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2021 increased by "a strong double-digit percentage year-over-year and sequentially" due to the success of its Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs. 

Sadly for AMD, all graphics cards today are sold at prices that are dramatically higher than their MSRPs, so increasing its sales might be a difficult task since even graphics boards meant to be inexpensive are priced unreasonably high due to demand amidst component shortages.

Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Freelance News Writer

Anton Shilov is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

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12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • spongiemaster
    Ramping up production will have no affect on GPU retail availability. If AMD makes more, miners will buy more. The only way to increase retail availability is to reduce demand from miners which is what Nvidia is trying to do with the mining limiter.
    Reply
  • ezst036
    AMD needs to make more mining cards available that are more beefy 2x or 3x a video card.

    Miners aren't buying up all video cards, just the ones which have exceptional hashing rate - they're laughing at the cards with poor hashing rate. Give them mining cards that make them laugh at any video card. But this business of sabotaging their own products - that's quite insulting.

    Making GPUs irrelevant for mining is what will have an affect on GPU retail availability.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    spongiemaster said:
    Ramping up production will have no affect on GPU retail availability. If AMD makes more, miners will buy more.
    Sooner or later, they will run out of power, cooling and space. It is also more difficult to hog the whole production when there is more of it. Bitmain's ETH miner is ~3X more power-efficient than GPUs and they are dumping their hardware on miners ahead of eth2.0 possibly launching earlier, so GPUs may not be particularly desirable for Ethereum for much longer.

    I wouldn't put much stock in Nvidia's hash rate limiter, it'll likely get broken or otherwise circumvented within weeks of serious miners getting their first batch. Even if it isn't, miners can simply mine anything else on it instead. With ASIC miners taking over ETH and eth2.0 possibly not far off in the future, they will end up doing exactly that either way.
    Reply
  • Jarmer
    Even if somehow miraculously they DO make more cards avail to market, I think it's too little too late for this gen. I've been trying for 5 months to get a 6800 xt and there's just zero percent chance I'm going to pay the astronomical retail rates for that card now that the 7xxx series is a mere 6 months away. (of course, not that we'll be able to buy that either).
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    InvalidError said:
    Sooner or later, they will run out of power, cooling and space. It is also more difficult to hog the whole production when there is more of it. Bitmain's ETH miner is ~3X more power-efficient than GPUs and they are dumping their hardware on miners ahead of eth2.0 possibly launching earlier, so GPUs may not be particularly desirable for Ethereum for much longer.

    I wouldn't put much stock in Nvidia's hash rate limiter, it'll likely get broken or otherwise circumvented within weeks of serious miners getting their first batch. Even if it isn't, miners can simply mine anything else on it instead. With ASIC miners taking over ETH and eth2.0 possibly not far off in the future, they will end up doing exactly that either way.

    Yes, there is a theoretical limit for power and space, but whatever increase in production AMD is going to come up with, it isn't going to get us anywhere remotely close to those limits. So why even bother bringing that up? Based on recent market share numbers, AMD could double their GPU production, and that would put them at half of what NVidia produces. China isn't going to run out of space and power if AMD increases GPU production by 10% or 15%.

    I have no idea how effective Nvidia's limiter is going to be. That wasn't the point. Only that an effective limiter is what it is going to take to increase GPU availability for the current generation. Increases in GPU production that are realistic based on current market conditions are going to do nothing.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    spongiemaster said:
    China isn't going to run out of space and power
    A couple of provinces in China and a few other places around the world including a handful of US cities have actually banned crypto-mining because they cannot spare the power. It is becoming a real issue that governments are having to take action on.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    InvalidError said:
    A couple of provinces in China and a few other places around the world including a handful of US cities have actually banned crypto-mining because they cannot spare the power. It is becoming a real issue that governments are having to take action on.
    You're convinced that Nvidia's mining limiter will pose no problem at all to these companies, but the insurmountable hurdle these multi million dollar companies will face is finding a building a few miles up the street in a neighboring town. I wish I had your optimism on how easy this mining craze is going to come to an end.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    spongiemaster said:
    the insurmountable hurdle these multi million dollar companies will face is finding a building a few miles up the street in a neighboring town.
    If an area is banning crypto due to power grid issues, the crypto-mining company will need to move more than a few miles away to avoid causing the same issues that got it banned from its previous location and likely end up forced to move again.

    Add the taxation, criminal facilitation and other legal issues, it is only a matter of time before we see more state-wide and country-wide bans.
    Reply
  • clsmithj
    RX 6700 XT is not the answer to NVIDIA's High-end graphics cards (RTX 2080, 2080 Super, 2080 Ti, now RTX 3070, 3080, 3090), that chip is a little die like the RX 5700 XT with 40 CUs and has ray-tracing hardware that the 5700 XT lacked.

    We only want BIG NAVI! RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, RX 6900 XT, RX 6900 XTX , these GPUs give to NVIDIA's high-end products.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    clsmithj said:
    We only want BIG NAVI! RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, RX 6900 XT, RX 6900 XTX , these GPUs give to NVIDIA's high-end products.
    I'm personally waiting to see how much the RTX3050(Ti) will cost if Nvidia ever gets around to launching them for desktops.
    Reply