Monday, October 17th 2022
AMD Cuts Down Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" Production As Demand Drops Like a Rock
AMD reportedly scaled down production of its Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors in response to bleak demand across the PC hardware industry. Wccftech claims to have read an internal company document calling for reduced supply to the channel as market response to the Ryzen 7000-series is weak. This comes hot on the heels of AMD revising its Q3-2022 forecast, trimming its guidance by a $1 billion drop in revenue, citing weak demand in the PC market. However, we are seeing no deviation from the launch pricing for Ryzen 7000-series SKUs or compatible Socket AM5 motherboards. The platform went on sale from late September, on the same day that Intel announced its competing 13th Gen Core "Raptor Lake" processors. The new Intel chips are expected to start selling from a little later this month.
Unlike 13th Gen Core processors, Ryzen 7000 series processors appear to be a victim of the platform—notwithstanding the high pricing of the processors, which start at $299 for the 6-core 7600X, buyers lack access to affordable motherboards, and have to contend with expensive DDR5 memory. Pricing of cheaper LGA1700 motherboards based on entry-level H610 and B660 chipsets with cost-effective DDR4 memory support have added depth to consumer choice, besides Intel's 12th Gen range starting from under $150.
Source:
Wccftech
Unlike 13th Gen Core processors, Ryzen 7000 series processors appear to be a victim of the platform—notwithstanding the high pricing of the processors, which start at $299 for the 6-core 7600X, buyers lack access to affordable motherboards, and have to contend with expensive DDR5 memory. Pricing of cheaper LGA1700 motherboards based on entry-level H610 and B660 chipsets with cost-effective DDR4 memory support have added depth to consumer choice, besides Intel's 12th Gen range starting from under $150.
242 Comments on AMD Cuts Down Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" Production As Demand Drops Like a Rock
As I have in previous posts shown, the BIOS flash chip doesn't cost 100$ either, nor the 8 copper layer PCB, nor just about anything else you can name.
There is no such thing which could be gotten from the bottom of the barre which will increase the AM5 boards' price by couple of 100s of USD or EUR.
I wonder how much labour costs have gone up in Taiwan and other parts of Asia where boards are produced, together with inflation? If you found that core compenents are essentially similar in market value, where else we could look for cost increase, apart from early adopter premium, to explain new prices?
For example, Gigabyte has one factory in Taiwan providing 25% of production capacity. As motherboard productions still requires a lot of manual labour, that factory will need to pay workers more than the one in, say Malaysia, due to different standard of life in the two countries. Is it possible that Gigabyte would need to offset those differences in retail prices, and if yes, how much?
But those differences don't make a AM4 80$ board turn into AM5 250 - 300$ board.
That conversion is a result of some very dark black magic.
After years of stagnation, AMD brought a revolution to the CPU market. We got cheap 6- and 8-core processors and Intel had to respond. We basically got double the performance. Then they brought 12 and 16 cores to the mainstream and Intel had to respond with their new hybrid and high IPC architecture. Multi-threaded performance skyrocketed.
Zen 3 was already a small step forward. IPC improvements were decent, but core counts stayed the same and clock speeds did not go much higher. Prices did, though, especially with no entry-level processors for 1.5 years since launch.
What does Zen 4 bring, except for the need to replace the entire platform? Not one of these processors is appealing to anyone already owning an older CPU with an equivalent core count.
"A well-run corporation does not waste money to research innovations, unless, of course, keeping up with the competition demands it."
Seems that after an amazing 4-year period (2017-2021) we might be looking at another stagnation in the CPU market. And it happens right when GPUs are starting to get very bottlenecked. Those yearly 10% improvements will not be enough, but at least there is hope for 3D cache. We need a major new architecture, though.
Zen4 is another step towards more serious changes in Zen5.
At least Nvidia is trying to combat this with frame interpolation (DLSS3.0), i wonder what AMD's answer will be with maybe RDNA4?
- Motherboards are grossly overpriced. The price difference between X670 and X670e is nonexistent. There are almost no decent X670 boards available without cutting massive corners.
- Even with the above fact, almost every motherboard has been on pre-order for over a month and are still mostly unavailable.
- There are no decent mATX or mITX boards. There is only 1 board in both categories - both ASUS (ROG Strix and Crosshair Gene), and both are complete garbage and grossly overpriced. The mITX one (ROG Strix) is almost £500 (a complete joke) or the mATX Crosshair Gene one for almost £600 with a single PCI-E x1 slot for expansion?? And both only support a pathetic 64GB RAM maximum? WTF would I be paying that sort of money for? ASUCKS' logo, RGB lights and not much else.
- There are no new GPUs available to pair them with from AMD. I'm not buying an entirely new PC and pairing it with some garbage overpriced 2 year old card that's about to be obsoleted. Despite the crazy discounts that I've heard about in the US, we've had none happen here in the UK or Europe.
- No X3D variants available. CPUs like the 7700X are stuck in a weird no-mans land -- where it's faster in some things, but slower in some games and still costs more than the 5800X3D.
- DDR5 still way too expensive.
I honestly don't know what AMD were thinking or how they were expecting a different outcome.Steve also found that i9 reaches 100 degrees and thermally throttles after just 17 seconds at ~305W, even with 420 mm AIO.
7950X continues to operate at 95 degrees normally, even with 120 mm AIO cooler.
In Blender, the CPU used ~500W of system power, with GPU idling. He branded this power hungry situation as "absolutely absurd", worse that i9 in Gen 11.
AMD will own Intel in the performance per watt metric for a couple more years. It'll be a tough battle for Intel to claw its way to the top of the performance per watt summit. And right now AMD is using TSMC as its foundry partner so they aren't giving up any easy points.
Of course, there's nothing (apart from money usually) that prevents people from owning multiple systems from different components inside. There's always some compromise being made whenever you buy something. Often it is cost.
I agree and i posted before that 7950X will be more efficient than 13900K and is to be expected being 5nm core + 6nm IOD vs intel7 and based on Alder/Zen3 efficiency delta.
But will also be $100 less than 7950X, if you compare it with $549 7900X (eventually we are probably going to have $579 13900KF also) it will win even in MT efficiency, AMD's pricing is clearly off.
If Zen4 platform had better pricing and around +10% better gaming performance it would be great though. (Also AMD should have made 142W the default PPT with 230W being an option, not the other way around imo, or at least make it two default PPT options easily selectable and give in marketing and review guidelines more emphasis to the 142W option)
From a practical standpoint, these are early production runs of this silicon. AMD is probably finding some yield challenges in getting higher performing, lower power parts.
They bin anyhow and most of the better samples will end up in their Datacenter business or maybe OEM builders like HP, Dell, Lenovo whose big institutional customers demand efficiency more often than Joe Consumer. At some point yields may improve enough for this to trickle down to retail SKUs.
Expecting it at new generation retail launch is not particularly realistic.
Just the emphasis would be in how more efficient Zen4 design is.
Regarding yields, I'm not talking about more efficient yielded dies, just the same Zen4 CPUs that we have now but with lower PPT options from the getgo, the results are great in lower PPTs as many Zen4 reviews show.
What I'm suggesting thought may have a downside for AMD regarding SEP levels that would get away asking (but great for us consumers) (also it seems even with the 230W strategy AMD didn't got away regarding what CPU prices is asking, but this is mostly gaming performance and motherboard cost fault) (if it had two factory PPT default options and executed better in marketing approach about it, i think it would have been a win, but i don't disagree with what you point out)
The value of the 13900K for just gaming is terrible, though, just as it always is for the i9s. This is a productivity CPU.
But the i5s and i7s will offer amazing value for gaming. I think AMD will have to launch the X3D versions at the price of the regular ones.
The consumer PC market is expected to contract after the pandemic-driven sales spike. Unfortunately this means that consumers will be offered AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA's sloppy seconds.
Leading with a lower PPT would be too difficult and time consuming to explain to that contracting consumer audience. It would definitely be a talking point for enterprise purchasing agents. Under different circumstances, what you are proposing might be worth considering but all companies need to adjust for the existing conditions, many of which are not in their control.
Wouldn't be surprised if I need a PSU upgrade, though.
:)
And I am willing to wager that AMD never said that the B350 would get AM4 CPU compatibility with all future products on launch day. AMD made good on their word.
:p:D