Chip production for AMD’s latest components could be facing delays
AMD MAY HAVE BEEN reaping success while Intel fell foul of a chip shortage, but Team Red could be facing its own supply shortage in the future.
According to DigiTimes, which tends to get the skinny on what’s going down at chip fabricators, AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series CPUs and Navi GPUs could be facing manufacturer delays.
That’s due to TSMC, which is reportedly struggling to keep up with the demand for 7nm chips. A lot of smartphone chips, including Apple’s new A13 Bionic, use the 7nm process and are clients of TSMC, so the chip fabricator is being stretched thin when it comes to production capacity.
As a result, AMD is said to be scrambling for production capacity, with TSMC supposedly extending the lead times on the production of 7nm chips from two to six months. That would potentially mean AMD could face chip shortages for its new 7nm products.
However, this is all based on unnamed industry sources running their mouths to DigiTimes, which isn’t always on the money when it comes to accurate rumours.
We dropped AMD a line to see what it has to say on the matter but it said it had no comment on the situation. So we contacted TSMC but have yet to receive a response.
Time will tell if there are chip delays and if they will impact upon AMD’s cranking out of Ryzen and Navi parts. But chip makers are usually good at managing this stuff so there’s a strong chance we might not notice it on the consumer side.
If such shortages do happen, one knock-on effect is there could be less parts for AMD-toting laptops, of which the Surface Laptop 3 could be one, meaning less of those machines around for eager beavers who want a laptop that eschews Intel’s Core processors.
All we have at the moment is speculation, so we’ll have to wait and see if these rumours carry any weight. µ