AMD CEO Says It's Limiting Supply of CPUs and GPUs to Maintain High Prices | Hacker News Reader

AMD CEO Says It's Limiting Supply of CPUs and GPUs to Maintain High Prices

extremetech.com

58 pointschazeon23 comments

I think this headline is a bit sensationalized. Dr. Su's quote in the article says nothing about the undershipping being "to maintain high prices". Retailers are likely just not interested in carrying large amounts of stock in a precarious market.

Interesting. I started limiting my demand for AMD CPUs and GPUs because of the artificially high prices.

AMDs were a thing because of the value proposition. You put up with the lack of new technology, or driver support, or customer support, because they were cheaper than Intel or nVidia.

But at high prices, AMD's entire value proposition disappears. If you're going to pay $1000 for a video card, you might as well get the future-proof nVidia card over the AMD card clinging to the past.

Hope RISC-V is broadly adopted eventually, so we get rid of this lame x86 duopoly.

Every time I see AMD in the news I hope to hear that they’ve invested in a RISC-V cpu. I would love a real desktop or professional class RISC-V chip made by an American company.

Except if I bought an nVidia card I'd have to deal with constant headaches with the drivers. So AMD is worth significantly more from my perspective. If nVidia would play nicely and put their drivers in the kernel it might be another story but until then I can't see how they'd ever be anything less than subpar.

> Except if I bought an nVidia card I'd have to deal with constant headaches with the drivers.

This just does not match my experience at all. Every AMD card I ever owned has had driver issues of some kind. Nvidia by contrast “just works”, totally worth the price premium.

Yeah I've always considered AMD the "store brand." Some people say it's 100% compatible and also equivalent quality, but no it's not. It's close, which is fine as long as it's cheaper.

Why shouldn’t they? Luxury car makers do it. Luxury watch brands do it.

These are not essential goods; if they can make more profit by selling fewer, I don’t see a problem.

A lot of these are also used for productive purposes. I bought a Threadripper to speed up compile times on my open source project. If I was running a slower CPU that's a net loss to society because I'd be less productive. Now, I can afford it and did, but others cannot. It's just wasteful of potential.

Right, but if you can't scrounge up $1000 to pay for a shinny new threadripper, how much productivity was actually lost? Presumably less than $1000, right?

If developer time is worth just $50/hr, that's just 20 hours to pay for itself.

Pugetbench says 448 seconds for the Threadripper 3990 to compile unreal vs 889 seconds for the Ryzen 5950X. That's over 7 minutes saved every compile or just around 170 compiles to pay for itself.

If you do just 5-6 compiles per day, that Threadripper pays for itself in just one month (not including any other system costs).

Most devs are worth way more than $50/hr and the payback time for them would be much, much shorter than that one month period.

> If developer time is worth just $50/hr, that's just 20 hours to pay for itself.

Note that I'm not claiming that a threadripper provides zero value to you. I'm saying that if it's providing value to you, you can easily justify the price, which puts an upper bound at how much productivity can be lost. After all, if you're losing $5000 worth of productivity over not buying a $1000 part, you'd be irrational not to buy it. Therefore, any productivity lost is basically capped at the cost of the part, which admittedly isn't trivial, but isn't some huge loss either.

Must be nice giving yourself an excuse to get paid to do nothing 30-50 minutes each day.

Its kind of an indication that theres not enough competition in the market if they can just choose to produce less to make more money. Other than veben goods, goods should decrease in price over time in the presence of competition assuming none of the inputs change price

The "underselling" thing is weird. Does he just mean they're pricing things higher and selling fewer? Cause that makes sense.

Isn't there a risk of never selling your stock once the GPU is seen as "previous generation" by limiting the supply artificially? Or are they just not producing enough cards in the first place? I don't really know what "We have been undershipping the sell-through or consumption for the last two quarters" means.

they just raise the price or keep the new price high for the next generation until they have most of the old supply out of the pipeline - this is what they've been doing with zen3.

Seems what Nvidia is also doing with the 3xxx and 4xxx GPUs

So AMD is a luxury brand now?

Maybe they figured they'd stop being seen as the "Pepsi" brand if they raised prices.

Either they do it or the scalpers do it. Might as well cut out the dodgy middleman. I’d much rather get the thing from retail with a receipt and warranty and second hand from Bob’s Bot Hardware Warehouse with locations on Craigslist and prices starting at $1.

I don't mind them doing this.

It probably makes financial sense because Intel has a fixed market share.

No matter how cheap AMD gets a hefty segment of the market will not be swayed. If it weren't for this I suspect AMD want to pounce and saturate the market.

I think people should primarily be mad about AMD continuously raising prices (particularly in lockstep with nVidia), because limiting supply naturally follows from that as a consequence or side-effect.

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