AMD Radeon RX 7000 ‘RDNA 3’ GPUs & Ryzen 7000 ‘Zen 4’ CPUs Launching This Year, Red Team Makes Significant Investments To Secure Increased Capacities For Gamers
The AMD Radeon RX 7000 ‘RDNA 3’ GPUs and Ryzen 7000 ‘Zen 4’ CPUs will be the biggest launch for the PC consumer segment, ushering a new era of high-performance computing for gamers & content creators. While AMD has given us a glimpse of what comes next during the CES 2022 key note, the company’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, confirmed that they are making significant investments to secure increased capacities of next-gen chips for the consumer segment. Since 2021, the large majority of the consumer PC segment has been riddled with supply and manufacturing constraints due to the global pandemic, rise of cryptocurrencies, and various additional factors which have resulted in a shortage of chip wafers and components. It’s not just the wafer prices that have gone up, but component prices have seen a huge hike too, resulting in prices for PC hardware components to rise significantly over the past 12 months. We’ve been working on the supply chain really for the last four or five quarters, knowing the growth that we have from a product standpoint and the visibility that we have from customers. So in regards to [the] 2022 supply environment, we’ve made significant investments in wafer capacity, as well as substrate capacity and back-end capacity. We feel very good about our progress in the supply chain to meet the 2022 guidance. And our goal is, frankly, to have enough supply to satisfy the demand out there. We feel good about the progress we’ve made in PCs," says Dr. Su, “and we’ll continue to ensure that we’re matching sell in with sell out so that there is not inventory build up in the business. We’re always in this for the long-term and working with our supply chain partners as well as our customers to ensure that we find a way to kind of share the additional costs,” says Dr. Su. “But our focus is on ensuring that we have the supply to meet the high demand. AMD CEO, Dr. Lisa Su via Seeking Alpha Many analysts have predicted that the situation will resolve by the end of 2022 which is when AMD is planning to introduce two major product lineups, the AMD Radeon RX 7000 GPUs & the Ryzen 7000 Desktop CPUs. Both of these products are expected to utilize TSMC’s 5nm (plus 6nm) process node, which would be costly but Dr. Lisa Su states that they have made significant investments to secure the capacity needed to support their growth in 2022 and beyond. Based on rumors, both the next-gen CPUs and GPUs are expected for a Q4 2022 launch, similar to their predecessor’s Q4 2020 launch. It remains to be seen whether this will hold true and if AMD will be able to offer enough supply to consumers who have been waiting to upgrade their GPUs and CPUs for over two years now. With that said, the AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs based on the Zen 3 core architecture and Radeon RX 7000 GPUs based on the RDNA 3 architecture are expected to deliver significant gains in performance. Whether AMD would raise the product prices once again or keep them at current levels remains to be seen. We have seen continuous claims from all manufacturers that upcoming launches will see better supply and prices but that hasn’t worked out even once over the past year. The recent RX 6500 XT and RTX 3050 launches are proof enough. It’s not just availability, in fact, availability of the cards has gotten much better but it’s the pricing that’s being decided by AIBs, distributors, and shop retailers that make the situation far worse for everyone across the globe. Intel is addressing this issue by spending multi-billion dollars into building their next-gen Fabs while NVIDIA has gone a similar route as AMD and spent several Billions of dollars to secure a vast supply of next-gen wafers for its GPUs that will power both consumer and data center segments. News Source: PCGamer
