AMD Ramps Radeon RX 6000 Supply Amid Historic Demand, RX 6000M Set For Q2 2021 Debut
During an earnings call with investors, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su said the company is planning to "ramp production" of its Radeon RX 6000 series, and expects "GPU sales to grow significantly" over the next several months as a result. AMD also intends to finally port its second generation Radeon DNA (RDNA 2) graphics architecture over to laptops in the near future.
The global shortage of silicon has impacted AMD and just about every other company entrenched in the technology sector. High-end CPUs like the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X (the latter of which is the second best-selling CPU on Amazon) are almost always out of stock, and the same goes for the vast majority of graphics cards, including the Radeon RX 6000 series.
Even so, AMD is coming off a strong quarter, in which it earned more than $3.4 billion in revenue, a massive 93 percent increase over the same quarter a year ago. AMD also saw a huge annual leap in net income, which grew 94 percent to $555 million during the first quarter of 2021.
"In graphics, revenue increased by a strong double-digit percentage year-over-year and sequentially, led by channel sales growth as revenue from our high-end Radeon 6000 GPUs more than doubled from the prior quarter...We expect Radeon 6000 series GPU sales to grow significantly over the coming quarters as we ramp production," Dr. Su said during the accompanying earnings call.
Don't breathe a sign of relief just yet, though. AMD can't just magically make more silicon appear. It's bound by what TSMC can deliver, and earlier this month, TSMC boss Dr. C.C. Wei warned that capacity could be strained all the way into 2023.
"We see the demand continue to be high," Dr. Wei told Bloomberg. "In 2023, I hope we can offer more capacity to support our customers. At that time, we’ll start to see the supply chain tightness release a little bit."
Even if AMD is able to ramp up production, gamers may still have a tough time finding a graphics card in stock, because of cryptocurrency miners and scalpers armed with scripted bots. It's just a crummy situation for the average consumer, and it could stay that way for a long while still.
Outside of desktop GPUs, Dr. Su said AMD is "on track for the first notebooks featuring our leading-edge mobile RDNA 2 architecture to launch later this quarter." In other words, the Radeon RX 6000M series will make its debut very soon, to duke it out with NVIDIA's mobile GeForce RTX 30 series in the laptop space.
Laptops featuring NVIDIA's mobile Ampere GPUs have been more readily available, and the same will likely be the case with AMD's mobile RDNA 2 lineup. We hope so, anyway.
