AMD Expects To Continue *Undershipping* To Keep Prices High On CPUs and GPUs

Posted on Sunday, Feb 19, 2023 by Chris Hayner

Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever

The english language is funny sometimes. The way I worded that headline flat out sounds bad- as though AMD were a bond villain who was nefariously tipping the scales of commerce because they can to maximize profits.

AMD’s position on this is more nuanced, with CEO Lisa Su implying that the undershipping is to predict the market and prevent retailers from situations where they would be holding more inventory than they wanted to. The reason for this is the slowing pace of consumers wanting or needing to replace hardware.

The obsession with GPUs was a great microcosm of this. Surely everyone remembers the crypto boom and scalpers selling GPU cards at 500% of MSRP? For better or for worse, that was a hot GPU market. This market… is no longer that.

Still, this is America. We can ding them for artificially suppressing supply to maintain a price point. We can also ding them for their ridiculous naming conventions such as releasing a benchmark product line called XTX, then releasing another, far less performant product line called just XT.

They must think we, the paying public, are suckers- and damnit. They’re probably right.