In general terms, I agree with you - in fact, I've been purchasing AMD for 20 years - both CPU and GPU (starting with Athlon 64 and ATI Radeon). But is now crystal clear that what we THINK we were seeing with Intel (14 nm process production over and over and over, no competition whatsoever, etc.), is nothing compared to what AMD and Nvidia are doing.
I mean, during the old intel-days, have you ever seen a "gaming CPU" (like 3770K, 4770k, 7700k, etc.) sold with the marketing BS of the "demand-larger-than-supply"? Because the 9800X3D - a simple 8 core - il sold at scalper-price, IF you can find IT.
Intel NEVER did something like that, even when was dominating the market.
Intel enjoys a huge production capacity, thanks to it's fabs. That's why you never seen "demand larger than supply" BS for it's CPUs. You can see it with the new graphics cards that are NOT produced in Intel's fabs, so Intel needs to wait in the line.
On the other hand AMD seems to be extremely conservative in how many units of a model it will produce. That's why they keep disappointing their investors. They don't seem to be able to take a risk and say "we expect this to sell well, let's build extra quantities and proved correct". Unfortunately this holds AMD back. AMD's financial results are usually spot on with what they announce and what most analysts expect and my belief is that is happening because as a company they are very conservative, very careful with how they will use their wafer supply. I don't believe selling a few batches of 9800X3D at $100 higher prices and losing the chance of selling double or triple those numbers, now especially that there is no Intel, makes much sense. You want people on AM5, as many as possibly, because this socket is here to stay for a few more years. They where probably saying "we expect the new Intel CPUs to sell well, so we expect to sell that many 9800X3Ds, let's not make more and end up with a huge inventory" so they probably didn't build enough to cover the extra demand. I believe that was their own excuse and it does sound like a honest reason, not like marketing BS. I don't think it is good marketing saying that your success is in part the result of someone else's failure. If you win a 100 meters race, because all of your opponents tripped, well, not much value in such win.
Also AMD has shown in the past that they can't really cover demand. They had problems with 5000 series success, they didn't manage to sell enough graphics cards, as Nvidia did, the period of the crypto mining craze, there where many rumors in the past that huge OEMs where not choosing AMD because AMD could not offer the quantities that companies like Dell for example wanted, so it wasn't always some Intel anticompetitive move, smaller manufacturers where coming out complaining that they weren't getting the full order of CPUs from AMD, that part of their order was delayed, now we see with 9800X3D supply constraints, in their previous financial they where saying that they couldn't even supply enough Instinct cards (which was the reason for the share price drop after their previous financial result), now we see them moving the 9070's closer to Nvidia's 5070 release date that looks like a suicidal move.
I don't think this is marketing BS. It's just fear of being in a situation of having a huge inventory that will have to be sold at much lower prices than expected. And unfortunately this is also the reason why AMD is not getting any bigger, it can't follow Nvidia's exploded success even by little.
