AMD’s CEO Lisa Su has been filling us in further on the topic of graphics card shortages and when they might be resolved, with some good news due to the purchase of Xilinx.
With AMD’s huge acquisition of semiconductor outfit Xilinx now finalized, Su has been talking to Yahoo Finance, and observed that this will considerably strengthen AMD’s supply chain, leading to better prospects for increased production and stock of Team Red’s graphics cards.
The CEO, however, underlined that the supply situation regarding AMD GPUs would remain “quite tight” in the first half of 2022, but then said that: “With the second half of this year, I think things will get a bit better ... We’re now planning multi-quarter, multi-years with our customers which makes for a more efficient supply chain … We hope to use that scale to ensure we get more than our fair share of capacity and support in the industry.”
As PC Gamer points out, this echoes what the CEO of big GPU rival Nvidia has been saying, with Jensen Huang observing that “we feel better about our supply situation” looking towards H2 of 2022, as well.
Analysis: The beginning of the end of GPU stock woes?
This backs up what we’ve heard before from both Nvidia and AMD. Lisa Su has, in fact, said that we’ll need to wait until the second half of 2022 before GPU stock improves a couple of times now. In short, we can’t expect any big improvements in the near future for graphics card supply, but that doesn’t mean things might not start to improve a bit (fingers crossed).
The consistency of this talk around a recovery from the component shortage in H2 2022 gives us hope that this is how the GPU situation will indeed pan out, although it’s difficult to be too optimistic given the horrible time we’ve had of late with consumer graphics cards. Demand has way outstripped supply, and massively inflated prices for what stock there is available.
It’s certainly a good omen for the future that Su is underlining that the Xilinx buyout will bolster AMD’s overall supply situation, and that Team Red has a long-term strategy to help ensure that it holds ‘more’ than a ‘fair share’ of capacity. Remember, this comes off the back of recent comments after AMD’s latest fiscal results, where Su remarked that the company has made ‘significant investments’ to improve wafer capacity, back-end capacity and more.
All of which hopefully means we can avoid a repeat of the current GPU situation which has plagued consumers for far too long now, although, of course, huge events that come out of nowhere like the pandemic are difficult to plan for and get around.
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