The CPU shortage has prompted AMD to hit the brakes on releasing products for the lower-end CPU market, according to CEO Lisa Su.
At an investors event on Monday, Su was asked whether her company would be shipping more processors if it had additional chip manufacturing capacity. In response, Su said the ongoing shortage is forcing AMD to prioritize certain products over others.
“There is some compute that we're leaving underserviced,” she said. “So I would say particularly, if you look at some of the segments in the PC market, sort of the lower end of the PC market. We have prioritized some of the higher-end commercial SKUs [Stock Keeping Units] and gaming SKUs and those kinds of things.”
In November, as the chip shortage began, AMD launched the Ryzen 5000 series, the company’s current generation of desktop processors. The CPUs have won rave reviews, but they’re also pricey, and start at $299 with the Ryzen 5600X before scaling up to $799 with the Ryzen 5950X.
A Ryzen 5000 CPU for $200 or less would be a dream for PC builders on a budget. But for now, AMD is refraining from expanding the desktop processor line, according to Su.
“Probably the fact that the inventories are very lean throughout the supply chain, and so people are really now focused on, 'Hey, we're not ordering stuff to put it on the shelf, right? We're ordering stuff that end customers want,' and that's how we think about prioritization. Prioritizing sort of the end customer needs as we go forward,” she said during the investors event.
In the meantime, buyers can consider last year’s Ryzen 3300X and 3100 CPUs, which initially launched for $120 and $99, respectively. But unfortunately, the chip shortage has inflated their pricing to $180 or more. The other alternative is to check out lower-end CPUs from Intel.
According to Su, the company hopes to add more chip manufacturing capacity over the “next couple of months.”