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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

What sales, they hardly had any stock available. I've been trying since the release to get my hands on a Ryzen 5900x and they're sold out everywhere. I'm trying to get on a waiting list for it now, fingers crossed that they can deliver before the new year.

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> What sales, they hardly had any stock available.

Out of curiosity, are you trying to buy a chip, or a system?

If the latter, is it possible that it's a problem with PC makers not assembling enough AMD systems, rather than AMD not making enough chips?

I'm asking because for a long time Intel would have deals where they'd give PC manufacturers a hefty discount if AMD were less than 10% of their sales; such that the only way for AMD to make it worthwhile for HP / Dell / whoever to make more than 10% AMD systems would be to pay them to put their chips in machines (negative costs). They were taken to court over it and punished, but that doesn't mean they aren't doing it again.

Particularly as apparently they're still saying what they did wasn't wrong in the first place:

https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-is-still-fighting-a-10-year-ol...

EDIT: What's with the downvotes? Intel did a pretty despicable thing to AMD; it's documented in a court case. And they're still fighting to say that what they did was fine. I think people deserve to know about that kind of behavior, and I don't think it's unreasonable to ask if it's still going on.

Not the person you replied to but: I’ve been trying to get the same one. No chance. Luckily the shop I ordered from has a queue system so I don’t have to hunt. Just today I got an email that their supplier is delayed the next shipment and they have no idea when anything is going to arrive

It's the chip in this case.

Intel did a pretty dirty thing there, how they haven't been slapped down for abusing a monopoly is beyond me. Do antitrust laws have any teeth in the US anymore?

Nope. At some point geopolitics came into the picture and the US decided it was going to protect its own bigcorps at any cost. The hidden threat was (and is) that China would never do such a thing as punish its own big corporations for anticompetitive, unethical and illegal practices.

This is "no one drives in New York, there's too much traffic" levels of logic.

Not really. There is an infinite available of cars that may be driven into NY. There is only a finite number of CPUs available. I have money and want a CPU but cannot get one. I doubt there is anyone in NY who cannot find a car for sale.

Luckily there are a bunch of other CPUs for sale too.

The counterpart in this analogy is not the cars themselves, but the capacity of the streets to hold the cars.

I just checked a couple boutique builders and they’ve all got 5000 series Ryzens in stock.

Then please share them. The small shops in Canada are reserving these chips for system builds, not as separate items. All the online options are only taking orders for future stock. If I want one of these before february I've been told to order from the US, with the associated costs/risks.

https://www.nowinstock.net/ca/computers/processors/amd/full_...

To be fair the traffic is jammed. The traffic surge happened a while back. I guess these are "presales". Our economy is getting jitted, wonder how that will end up working.

More like a soft launch from AMD. They launched with a very limited amount of stock available.

The fact that these products are out of stock everywhere implies more sales than if they were sitting on shelves.

Or low supply. The RTX 3080 is impossible to find, but not because they have high sales. They just haven't made very many of them.

But it does have high sales. It was hyped to the moon.

Hype != sales. And I'd be interested to see what sales numbers you're referring to. Every single source I can find says retailers are receiving very low supply, and obviously selling out of that very low supply. But selling out of low supply does not equate to high sales numbers.

But if you have a source that says otherwise I would love to see it.

P.S. I'm sure it would have great sales numbers if they could make enough of them. I'm not suggesting the demand isn't there.

Check out the November Steam results.

The RTX 3080 is already at 0.23%. After just 1 month.

If you don’t think that’s impressive, compare it against some AMD GPUs like the 5700 or the 5600 XT, which has the same share.

There’s a reason Nvidia’s quarterly gaming results where a blowout.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

One of the several Danish retailers publishes their waiting list data: https://www.proshop.dk/RTX-30series-overview which are impressive -- just that one retailer received 3500 cards, 4300 clients have bought and not received them and they have ordered 24000 cards into their shop for future sales. And out of the 24,000 ordered, they only have confirmation for 860.

This is large retailer, but once of a dozen in Denmark.

Not saying that's not impressive, but you had me thinking for a second that Nvidia was already going past AMD's previous top end card. But that's actually the 5700XT, which is 4.5x as popular as the RX5700 non-XT. The RX5700 is not as widely available in the first place if my understanding is correct.

But yeah Nvidia in general has got the market for gamers pretty much cornered. People will go for Nvidia all the time if the price is the same ballpark. But it still has ways to go before it comes even close to its predecessors in the RTX 2080 and the RTX 2080 Super, both of which are about as popular as the RX5700XT.

Don’t you find it mind blowing that after such a short time on the market, it already has 1/5th of the share of a 5700 XT?

Of course it won’t come close yet to the 2000 series. But what it shows without a doubt is that there was plenty of supply and that gamers bought it.

There is no reason to think at this time that supply was lower than any other launch before it.

But demand was way higher.

It's a bit higher than I was expecting for sure, but I'm not exactly mind blown by it. AMD is famously unable to sell their high end cards to the Steam audience (at least in recent years) so the ability for a new and hyped Nvidia card to sell well in a month's time (especially these months' time), is very much not surprising.

The only surprise for me here is that the stock of Geforce cards they got out is slightly higher than complainers on internet forums makes it seem. If they truly already had enough stock to cover 1/5th the demand of the RTX 2080 then their stock situation is not great but not all that bad (these numbers are not that, but an indication).

> What sales, they hardly had any stock available.

No one goes to Disney World anymore; its too crowded. And, no one buys AMD CPUs anymore, they're always sold out!

It's a supply side phenomenon, not demand side. AMD launched the 5900 with very little stock. To be fair the sales the article is discussing are most of the other product lines, and they mention the issue.

> What sales, they hardly had any stock available.

Some people gave the same reaction when there were no EPYC processors available when they were first announced.

Then we've learned that almost all of the production has ended in Google's, Dropbox's and other big tech's data centers. :)

It's quite frustrating that this is becoming the norm, whether it be the 3XXX Nvidia cards, Playstation 5s, Ryzen CPUs, why is it that no hardware company can keep up with demand these days?

They're all bottle-necked by availability at TSMC.

What's bottlenecking TSMC? The availability of more ASML equipment? The production of silicon? Literal floor space in the foundries? The ability to get stuff in or out of Taiwan?

Probably limited capacity of state-of-the-art foundries.

Scalpers aren't helping. I'd be super curious how many they've gotten vs normal customers.

Scalpers don't keep them. They redistribute them to normal customers.

...at elevated prices. "How much blood did the leech suck?" is a valid question. Dollars would be better units than number of video cards, but the number of video cards passing through the leeches correlates and is still meaningful.

...at elevated prices ...that the buyers were willing to pay.

All non-zero prices are elevated compared to zero. All parties are consenting here.

Same with the Series X, I want one of the boy for Xmas, co-worker of my missus managed to get 5 of them, he wanted 650 for a console he paid 450 for.

I told her to tell him where to shove it.

It's not that I can't afford it, it's that scalpers can go fuck themselves, the boy will be more than happy with Quest 2 and my current gaming PC in the new year when I can build another.

And whoever ends up with the one you didn't buy will be happy too. I see this as a win/win/win.

So remember the pandemic

COVID means spiked demand (people are bored) while reducing the supply cap (lockdown, broadened sick leaves, etc). Combine that with the separate spike caused by a solid HW generation all-around and the result shouldn't be too surprising.

What ever happened to the laws of supply and demand? If the demand is high, and the supply is limited, they should be raising their prices. Stockx says an xbox series X is worth $750, a PS5 is worth $950, and a Ryzen 5900X worth $800. Why can't vendors just raise their prices, so I can buy from a retail outlet I trust, rather than a scalper.

honestly I wonder the same thing, but I think the average consumer views this as something like "first-party scalping". large price movements (in either direction) immediately after release make people dislike the brand.

still doesn't make sense to me. these are computer parts, not insulin; set the price as high as is necessary to keep units in stock.

I know some of them worry about angering customers by "price gouging", but customers get mad when they can't get the product too. Might as well make money on the anger.

In a way people are getting gouged regardless by competing for a limited quanto. Whoever gets lucky and gets their hands on a unit can just go and upsell it at a higher price

By not increasing their prices AMD is letting the after market have that surplus. Sure they don't need to get their hands dirty (and risk negative PR), but also it means they can't ship as many units or profit as much as they could have.

A lot of it is because eventually production will catch up, and in the meantime companies want to catch consumer attention with the actual intended retail price while still big in the news rather than scaring them away with a higher launch price and then dropping it later and risk not catching the attention of uninvested customers.

There is also some marketing value in having a product sell out quickly.

I was in front of a 3060 ti, I could afford it but it was frigging $730 CAD and there is no way I am forking that amount of money to play video games.

For limited launches doing blind auctions would be really cool. You wouldn't have web pages melting down and requiring people to hammer f5, because you could run the auction for long enough that everyone can get their bid in. And at least theoretically scalpers should have much harder time making profit in a well-organized auction. And nobody can accuse vendor of price gouging in an auction because the price would be so purely market-driven.

This happened with the Nvidia 2xxx cards too.

I think it's less that they can't keep up with demand, and more that they're "launching" earlier in the production process.

In the past they would have just launched later.

It's also a marketing ploy. It sounds much, much better when all you keep hearing is "out of stock", "sold out". It creates "fear of missing out" (FOMO). You know, like in real life when you see a long queue in front of a shop.

But then by the time they are in stock a successor is already around the corner.

For starters all the Xbox, PS5, Ryzen and RX chips come from the exact same production line. And the Samsung N8 yield doesn't seem to be anything special regarding Nvidia. Add that repeated waves of Covid lock-downs have made demand explode and that we're in the busiest period of the year anyway...

Yeah this has been a huge problem for me too. I'm about to just go Intel instead. I hope they ramp up production and don't miss out because I think a strong AMD would be a good thing. I can't wait forever to build my new rig though and I've been using Intel for decades so I have confidence in it. Excited to go AMD but I am building a new rig for a reason (my old one is in its death throes and I use this thing all day almost every day for work).

My old desktop is still a beast with a 10 core Xeon and 128GB of ram. I'm investing in a new rig to speed up my rust compiles. The current machine is 4 years old now, so I can afford to wait a few months for a build that will last me that long.

Do you actually get real RoI on that thing? Must have cost magnitudes more than normal desktop hardware. Or is this where you just accept that it's worth it purely for tingling the geek inside you?

A faster compiling machine is the difference between sustaining a state of flow critical to developer productivity, or not. Paying even $5000 for a desktop that yields probably a 2x improvement in productivity for someone paid at least $10K a month is a total no-brainer.

I think 2x improvement in productivity is a pretty optimistic number unless you don't write much code and mostly just compile it. In heavier workloads there certainly can be decent ROI though.

Compile time impact is a very non-linear thing. There's a narrow band that could be called the distraction threshold. An investment in faster hardware will give very small returns if you are already below that range and only moderate returns when so far above that the investments only gets you a little closer. But when the speedup crosses that narrow band or at least significant parts of it, it's a night and day difference.

Is there an average number for the distraction threshold or is each person pretty different?

Once it goes over about twenty seconds for me, I'm switching tasks or checking my email (or worse, HN.)

Keeping that compile time down is critical to being productive.

And the 24 Core 128G RAM machines are how we get bloated software...

(not blaming anyone in particular)

My dad got me a really good deal ($600!) on the RAM on ebay, otherwise I think 64gb would have been plenty. The nice thing about it is the Linux buffer cache keeps everything in memory, the SSD is just for durability.

Over 4 years of heavy software development I think the system has paid for itself in time saved.

I built a TR 3960X (24 core) 32GB of RAM workstation for $3000, including a 700 dll graphics card (2080 Super). Realistically a 100 dollar graphics card would've sufficed for my usage (development). So it could've been built for $2400.

Depending on the context such a machine could be very cheap or very expensive, but even here in Mexico that's about one month of an engineer's salary, which I don't find too outrageous for a primary tool which lasts for years.

Depending on your workload, the performance improvements could be very noticeable (running multiple VMs, compiling, and unit testing at the same time). It does open up faster workflows if you adjust to the new speed.

Old server hardware can be very cheap, although it's not necessarily the best value. Typically it only makes sense if 1) you need a lot of memory, 2) you don't mind a slightly higher power bill and 3) you don't care about single core performance.

I've used a 12-core Haswell Xeon as a desktop for about five years (got it used for around $500, plus $200 for a brand new LGA 2011 v3 motherboard). At the time it was twice as fast as a high-end desktop 4-core CPU. It's still reasonably competitive on multithreaded workloads versus a recent 6 core desktop CPU, but fares poorly on single-threaded tasks. DDR4 was a bit expensive back then, but quad channel memory helps in that you can buy lower density DIMMs. Today, even DDR4 ECC RDIMM server pulls are dirt cheap. I picked up 4x16GB DDR4-2400 RDIMMs for just $90 last year.

I'll probably replace it with a 5900X soon, but it's served well over the past five years. Certainly much better than a i7-4770K box from the same time.

>I hope they ramp up production

Every high-performance CPU released lately uses TSMC for manufacturing, which can't keep up with demand.

See Playstation 5/Xbox shortages, Ryzen and Radeon shortages. I think only Apple was able to secure enough manufacturing.

Would Nvidia's shortages also fall in this bucket?

Nvidia used samsung. Rumor has it that their shortage is because they sold their cards directly to cryptominers.

I believe this was debunked. The sales to cryptominers only represents a few percents of the total.

That is stuff angry gamer kids make up to find a reason to be mad. The reality is that manufacturing is generally slowed due to covid, and demand is generally high due to covid, and nobody can keep up.

Is mining on GPUs still something people do? Or can be done anywhere near profitable? I got the impression with ASICs that game was up.

It's for ASIC resistant currencies I believe

Nvidia's RTX 3000 line is manufactured by Samsung, not TSMC.

We know more about Nvidia shortage on 3000 series: Samsung wafer, substrates and components (maybe the GDDR6X memory chip which only Micron can make).

[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/275530/nvidia-rtx-30-series-shor...

All rumors about low supply 3000 series are debunked by looking at their quarterly revenue results and the Steam ranking that was released yesterday. (See my other reply.)

If you can hang on for a couple more weeks. Supply side is supposed to get a lot better on the AMD cpus by the last two weeks of december.

If you don't need the best single core performance, the cheaper Ryzen 3000 chips are still available.

And unlike intel they've been using the same sockets for the last 3 generations, so upgrading the CPU in future is actually a reasonable idea.

The article states as much. Most of the sales aren't from 4th gen ryzen, though the 5600x has had a fair amount of sales.

I got a 5800X this week from my local MicroCenter to build a new system for Flight Simulator (they are sold out 5800X and 5900X or and 5000 series at all currently). Getting a new video card is also a problem.

Yeah was going to buy a 5900X and an NVidia 3070. Can't get either so spent the cash I had lying around on an M1 Mac Mini to play with.

Edit: I’m still going to buy the first two items at some point. But not yet.

Same deal with new GPU's from AMD and nVidia.

Yes, it's really nice that there's more mipmaps than ever before, but that doesn't do me much good if I can't actually buy your thing.

Exactly. Intel is hardly being left "in the dust."

In the enthusiast segment where people build their own machines, perhaps. AMD is yet to get traction in the mass volume corporate desktop/laptop markets, although they have also taken significant market share in the lucrative server market.

Corporate desktop market is interested in exclusively cpu with integrated videos, cheap motherboards and low idle consumption. AMD fails in at least two of these points.

I've noticed HP has been offering laptops now with AMD processors instead of Intel.

Right now there is nothing available CPU or GPU wise.

Where are you signing up? Micro Center won't do stock alerts or waiting lists.

I gave up getting a 5900x and went with a 5800x because I was tired waiting for it.

actually in germany you can't get your hands on ANY 5000X series chips. there is basically zero stock.

I assume Intel’s prioritizing their high-volume customers over retail channels.

What’s this have to do with intel?

Because Intel doesn’t have competitive fab/products Intel customers are buying up AMD products (at consumer level).

Ok, I misread the parent comment.

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