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Comment by mikeInAlaska | Hacker News Reader

I totally gave up on finding a Ryzen 5xxx series chip. What a terrible year for product releases.

A lot of people switched to remove work due to coronavirus and now they need a laptop, so the demand is extremely high for laptops and it's components. It's much easier to do almost any work on a laptop than on smartphone.

> remove work

Typo of the day :D

The article (and presumably the parent comment) is talking about desktop CPUs. Laptop chips are generally soldered onto the motherboard, so you don't buy them separately.

Right, but if AMD need to produce these chips and more people are working from home, thus more people are potentially buying laptops then a cut of the available chips could potentially still be going into laptops?

Leaving less available chips for desktops. Additionally, I've heard that prebuilt desktop builders are also in high demand for the chips.

No, generally desktop chips and laptop chips are entirely different products. For example, none of the Zen 3 AMD desktop chips have integrated graphics, while all of the laptop ones do. And with the way semiconductor fabrication is done, I believe that the volume of chips manufactured was planned well in advance, and pivoting from making one to making the other cannot be done quickly.

If you live near a Microcenter, they are available in store.

I actually was at the Dallas store with a ticket to buy a 5600X, but left for two reasons: I decided I didn't need to spend $300 for marginal noticeable performance increases, and I didn't want to stand in the checkout line for an hour.

Can anyone tell me why there are shortages of these chips, as opposed to the prices being set so that demand is more in line with supply?

(I'm not asking for possible reasons why this sort of thing can happen; I'm asking whether anyone here knows which of them applies in this case.)

Because they don't want to be dismissed towards Intel, and also that's a move that will earn you a lot of ill will.

Instead, these companies allow resellers to sell above MSRP and send AMD/NVidia/etc... a cut.

Really? I thought this was because demand anticipation is hard, and chip manufacturing requires a long pipeline

Yeah, the system integrators are getting their supply, so retail BYOPC buyers aren't seeing as much stock as they would if supply was higher. Ryzens are still easier to find than GPUs though. I've seen the 3xxx series chips in stock at a few places.

Consoles see a crunch for a month or two and then are usually available: this means some of those early buyers might have paid more than MSRP, while most other people won't. People can find alternatives or wait a bit in this case.

COVID-19.

- factory closures and employee issues.

- supply chain issues due to covid.

- wfh demand.

- gaming demand.

- trump tax tariffs. Gpu exemption expired in January. I’m not sure if CPU’s are affected.

The biggest contributors are WFH demand, more PC gaming, but especially crypto mining and release of new consoles.

Mining and the new consoles take tons of silicon. And everybody is competing for the same fabs.

Supply chain problems and tariffs aren't doing much (if anything). Fabs run 24/7 365 and we just can't make enough chips

I was really lucky to find the 5800X for sale directly from AMD. Looks like it's out of stock right now, but was definitely available for purchase even like a week ago. Just poor luck! Buying PC components right now is an absolute chore.

You can just buy it on Amazon right now, they're actually not too hard to find. You can also find it in store at original MSRP.

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