Delivery bottleneck of AMD’s Ryzen 4000 CPUs for notebooks? Many orders are postponed considerably, will the CPUs become more expensive?

In this context, it is interesting to note that a member of XMG Schenker’s staff sent a letter to Reddit, which openly addresses precisely this problem. Thus, on 31. July the ODM made the announcement that AMD was facing a serious CPU shortage in Q3 2020. Major orders whose delivery has been confirmed by their ODM for mid and late August are now to be postponed until the end of September. According to the employee, this can be explained by a significant increase in demand from larger brands and by the presumed bottlenecks in AMD’s production capacity.

After this message was received on 31. After receiving the report on July 7, the company contacted AMD’s corporate contacts, who confirmed that this was an industry-wide bottleneck and that there was no solution. XMG currently has an open order backlog of over 1600 units on the ODM for the Ryzen 7 4800H. However, both AMD and the ODM had confirmed that the CPUs would be delivered but that the product would not reach the ODM before the end of September.

One can understand that XMG is very disappointed that the ODM was not able to inform about these bottlenecks in advance. On the other hand, it is not entirely surprising that AMD is now in difficulties to meet this demand, considering that AMD is a much smaller company compared to Intel, with much less financial leeway and no factories of its own.

AMD’s chip maker TSMC is in high demand by NVIDIA and other major technology companies, and they usually have months of advance bookings, so AMD can’t ramp up production fast enough to meet current demand. Such a thing is called a forecast, but it doesn’t seem to be AMD’s core competence, if you remember for example the RX Vega and the forgotten orders of capacities at the packagers.

It seems that the big buyers for notebook computers have placed quite large orders with AMD and the sales records of AMD’s laptops in China are no real secret. This in turn is now increasingly affecting “normal” ODMs and their medium and smaller customers. According to the law of supply and demand, AMD’s prices to customers should also increase, but this has not yet been definitively confirmed.

Source: XMG (via Reddit)