Supply of AMD’s 7nm Ryzen CPUs and Radeon Navi GPUs may be on the cusp of hitting some serious roadblocks on their way to customers.
AMD Chip Supply
According to rumors from industry sources, TSMC, the semiconductor foundry responsible for providing the 7nm nodes in AMD’S chips is struggling to churn out sufficient units to match demand from the PC and mobile sectors, specifically 5G tech. In an unprecedented move, it has preemptively extended production lead times from two months to six months.
The company has reached production capacity for the 7nm node as the tech has become a central pillar of a lot of new components and heavily requested by some of the biggest players in the tech industry such as Apple and AMD. Companies utilizing the manufacturer’s services will now have to make requests for orders with the new lead time in mind to mitigate the extra time to delivery.
How Will This Affect AMD?
It’s hard to say how this may affect AMD, but the repercussions shouldn’t be felt too badly on the customer side. The tech giant is among TSMCs most high profile clients, and we imagine there are some pretty watertight provisional contracts in place for precisely this type of situation. Additionally, TSMC is expanding production capacity by an extra 5000 units per month, which should help meet demand to some extent.
The risk is how the limited production capacity will affect node provision moving forward. AMD is about to rack up the production of 7nm based products like the Ryzen Threadripper Series, EPYC chips and the Ryzen mobile variant, meaning even higher demand. Looking even further into the further with the arrival of Zen 3 and RDNA 2 chips, it remains to be seen how TSMC will handle the shift to 7nm+ production.