AMD Expects Tight Manufacturing Capacity in First Half of 2021 During its fourth quarter and full year earnings call, company CEO Dr. Lisa Su told shareholders that AMD "expects some tightness through the first half of the year. On the flip side, AMD expects more capacity to come online in the second half.

AMD currently uses TSMC, the world's leading silicon maker, for nearly all of its chips, with the exception of GlobalFoundries' chips. For gamers, the RX 6000 series GPUs will no doubt look the most aloof and hard to come by. In any case, it will still be hard to find just sitting on shelves.

As one would expect from the company's rapid product launch timeline, production capacity for the former appears to be reaching its limits for the time being.

AMD expects the tight supply of chips to continue until at least late 2021, so we may not see significant changes in the near future.

"It's fair to say that overall demand has exceeded our projections," Su said during the earnings call (via Seeking Alpha).

"As a result, we had some supply constraints at the end of the year. It was primarily the PC market, the low end of the PC market, and the gaming market. [That said,] we have seen great support from our manufacturing partners. The industry needs to raise its overall capacity levels. So there will be some tightness in the first half of the year, but capacity will increase in the second half."

At least on the CPU front, AMD is painting a picture of overwhelming demand wiping out most Zen 3 desktop processors.

AMD does not say much about GPU statistics or numbers, only broadly suggesting that there were three times more RDNA 2 GPUs available in the first few months after launch than any other graphics card that cost more than $549 at its previous launch.

But even so, it is difficult to make a direct comparison, since the only RDNA 2 graphics cards in existence cost more than $549. Also, in recent history, there have been few gaming graphics cards above that amount; the Radeon VII was one of the few cards in the past half-century that was not a full-fledged GPU launch, at $699, and the RX Vega 64 Liquid, at the same price, was difficult to find

We were one of the few cards to get a full-fledged GPU launch, at $699.

We had hoped for a little more clarity from AMD about availability during the call, but it never came. The company has remained silent on further availability since the launch of the RX 6000 series, and in this regard, the lack of news is probably not good news.

Nvidia has been a bit more forthcoming about supply. Colette Kress, the company's CFO, said that supply should pick up around May. This is only one month earlier than when AMD had expected the earliest increase in supply capacity to be mid-year.

In any case, we face inventory shortages until sometime in the summer. And it's not just GPUs and CPUs that are hard to come by; chips of all types and applications are competing for the space that is now available. There simply aren't enough of them.