System news
This month, Mark Williams wonders where all the Ryzen 4000 laptops are.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the economy seems to be bifurcating into boom or bust businesses. You are either doing really well at the moment, or you’re struggling.
Fortunately, I’m seeing the boom side of the economy at my work, and like so many others as a result, our IT needs have ballooned with a great need to order everything from printers to monitors, new PCs and more. One thing that caught my attention during all this was when we needed some more laptops. I was looking at what Dell had on offer and wondered where are all the Ryzen 4000 series laptops? There were none! Dell had the latest 10th Gen Intel products, but the only AMD parts on offer were old Ryzen 2000 series units.
This was confusing, as AMD has some very compelling APUs currently that frequently beat out Intel’s parts not only in performance, but also battery life and thermals. Ryzen 4000 parts should be on sale by now as they’ve been out for five months since their launch in March.
What’s the story? It turns out that AMD is something of a victim of its own success. Not long ago a laptop brand called XMG based in Germany notified customers that laptop orders with Ryzen 4000 APUs were being delayed by four to six weeks, as its supplier couldn’t source enough APUs from AMD to make the laptops. Contacting AMD directly, XMG was told that “this is an industry-wide shortage and there is no way around it”. Apparently big OEMs have finally caught on that AMD is making some very compelling mobile parts now, and have flooded the company with orders, causing the shortage.
Whether TSMC can ramp more 7nm fabrication capacity to help the situation, or if AMD can sacrifice the production of another part to free up some of its allocated capacity at TSMC, remains to be seen. It could also be the reason why the desktop 4000 series APUs haven’t launched yet. AMD simply can’t get them made.
As bad a situation as it is for buyers and OEMs, it’s the best of problems to have if you’re AMD. It is experiencing the highest levels of CPU market share since the Athlon64 days. Mercury Research recently published some market share numbers, and by its reckoning AMD’s mobile processor shipments made up about 20% of the market last quarter. In a market segment that Intel has heavily dominated for so long, that is an amazing feat! AMD has essentially doubled its market share in the space of two years and, with all this pent-up demand, it seems that will only continue to rise.
There’s already good news around the corner for those wanting Ryzen 4000-powered laptops, especially of the gaming sort. At the time of writing Dell is finally offering a Ryzen 4000-powered laptop in the form of the G5 15 SE, and our friends over at Aftershock PC said “[We] are about to launch our first AMD [laptop] in the next week or two, stock is finally coming in! Even though it will be quite limited. We have been trying to get them for many months [as] there have been continuous supply issues in getting allocation to Australia”. So keep an eye out for that and if you’re wanting an AMD powered laptop, it’s just a matter of time
“One thing that caught my attention during all this was when we needed some more laptops. I was looking at what Dell had on offer and wondered where are all the Ryzen 4000 series laptops? There were none!”