Last year, AMD finally released a family of graphics processors that can compete against Nvidia’s high-end offerings in terms of performance. Unfortunately, AMD could not meet demand for new GPUs. But apparently there is light at the end of the tunnel as AMD is ramping up production.In their latest earnings call, AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, promised to ramp up production of the AMD Radeon RX 6000 RDNA 2 Gaming graphics cards. The RDNA 2 powered gaming graphics cards from AMD have been in short supply ever since they launched.
Both AMD and NVIDIA have been facing severe supply issues since last year. The reason behind this is due to several constraints due to the pandemic which is hindering the production process. TSMC has been at near 100% production capacity and yet, GPU manufacturers have been unable to meet the huge demand in the consumer segment.
According to AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, the company is expected to ramp production for its Radeon RX 6000 series gaming graphics cards based on the RDNA 2 architecture in the coming quarters. The red team also expects its Radeon RX 6000 GPU sales to grow significantly so we can expect an increased supply to retail channels.
We expect Radeon 6000 Series GPU sales to grow significantly over the coming quarters as we ramp production.
We see good customer ordering patterns and strong backlog. And then we have also seen that the supply chain has been tight overall for the semiconductor industry. And we’ve been working very closely with our supply chain partners. And so we also have good visibility to additional supply as we go throughout the year.
And whether you’re talking about consoles or you’re talking about PC gaming or you’re talking about the overall sort of gaming ecosystem, there’s a significant demand. And so we believe there’s strong demand, and we’re continuing to ramp supply to meet that.
At the same time, AMD’s CEO states the current Radeon RX 6000 gaming graphics cards demand still exceeds supply and we have heard similar statements from NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang. Industry analysts have hinted that the GPU supply issues will persist till the end of 2021 and we can expect things to normalize around early-2022.
Yeah. So the consumer graphics or the gaming graphics business, as you talked about, has actually done well for us. It grew double digits this past quarter. We had a very deliberate strategy here with the launch of RDNA 2.
We started at the top of the stack with our Big Navi product. And then we’ve now introduced a couple of additional products. And you’ll see that both from the channel, sort of adding board cards into more OEM systems and notebook business as well as additional variants. So it’s an important market segment for us.
We’re happy with the progress. I think gamers really appreciate the product. It’s fair to say that the graphics demand is very high across the marketplace. So we’ve actually put quite a bit of product into the market, but the demand still exceeds supply.
AMD acknowledged that its graphics revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2021 increased by “a strong double-digit percentage year-over-year and sequentially” due to the success of its Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs. We do have to keep in mind that the Radeon RX 6000 RDNA 2 Gaming graphics cards were never sold at their advertised MSRPs. The pricing for the cards is 2X over the MSRP due to high demand.
The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT has an MSRP of $999 US but the cheapest custom model costs $1399 US and that’s out of stock for months now. Recently, the Navi 21 XTXH GPUs which were launched went up for over $2000 US which is insane.
AMD is soon going to introduce its mobility RX 6000M series GPUs for laptops too which will further put stress on its ability to offer gaming GPUs for the desktop segment.
