Supply may be getting better
XMG, a boutique PC maker in Germany, wrote that supply of AMD’s Ryzen 5000-series ‘Cezanne’ processors for laptops had been improving in the recent weeks and would get generally better in the third quarter. The company also said that while prices of high-end PC components remain high due to supply constraints, supplies from Intel and Nvidia were stable. Meanwhile, XMG said nothing about availability of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs.
That makes sense, as we’re also seeing desktop ‘Cezanne’ CPUs starting to ship, and they’ll be launching for the retail DIY market in early August. You can see our early testing of the Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G for details. These compete with the best CPUs, with the latter being particularly interesting for people who want better integrated graphics while we wait for the best graphics cards to become affordable.
While AMD’s Ryzen 5000-series ‘Cezanne’ processors for laptops are very competitive and are in high demand, the company could not really capitalize on them as their supply was insufficient. Companies like XMG could not even launch some of their planned products in the recent months due to AMD CPU shortages, but as AMD is ramping up its supplies, the situation is getting better and machines based on AMD’s high-performance Ryzen 7 5800H as well as Ryzen 9 5900HX will be readily available in July and August.
“We are seeing a lot of AMD Ryzen 5000 (Cezanne) supply coming in to our factory right now,” a statement from XMG reads. “We seem to be getting enough supply to fulfill all of the orders that we have planned for the majority of this year.”
XMG indicates that Q2 was a particularly bad quarter for its AMD-based machines as far as supplies were concerned. While AMD launched its high-end Ryzen 7/9 processors for gaming notebooks featuring the Zen 3 microarchitecture in the second quarter, it did not ship enough units and even lowered the number of previous-generation CPUs it shipped to XMG.
Given how AMD’s supplies to XMG are improving, the boutique PC maker expects its shipments of AMD-based machines to skyrocket in Q3. The company expects to be able to significantly increase sales of machines based on both Ryzen 5/7 4000-series and Ryzen 7/9 5000-series processors in the third quarter. There is a catch though: it looks like the majority of these PCs will use Nvidia’s discrete GPUs as XMG says nothing about offering computers with AMD’s Radeon RX 6000-series inside.
Speaking of Nvidia and Intel, XMG noted that it gets everything it expects to get from these vendors, but notes that pricing of GDDR6/GDDR6X memory (used with 90% of modern GPUs) has increased significantly.
In addition to CPUs and GPUs, there are other components that got more expensive this year and are still in tight supply, according to XMG. Among such components are LCD panels, Realtek’s ALC274 with Smart Amplifier audio controller, Cypress’ CYPD5225 USB-Type-C and Power Delivery controller, and a number of other things. While there are analogues, they are uneasy to deploy because different chips require different PCB design layout and take time to validate.
In general, XMG does not expect components shortage to end any time soon, but it believes that it will be able to lower its delivery times in the coming months since the situation is improving.