An interview with AMD CEO Lisa Su, published in Barron's, tells exactly what we are hearing elsewhere in the industry. The interview touches on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the company, as well as AMD's plans after its $35 billion acquisition of Xilinx.

But what stands out in this interview for PC gamers is the one about the pressured supply chain. Lisa Su states that over the past 12 months, "demand has far exceeded our aggressive expectations."

This is something we have all felt the effects of, with graphics cards becoming virtually impossible to purchase and CPUs becoming hard to find during the holiday season. Thankfully, however, you should be able to get your hands on AMD's Ryzen 5000 series CPUs now.

The shortage of these chips is likely to continue and "this year is going to be pretty tough," although AMD's CEO did say that the company is "ramping up production capacity every quarter," which is probably not what anyone wants to hear.

We are starting to see graphics card prices begin to return to normal levels, with German cards down from a high of 304% of MSRP to 153%. While this is obviously still too high, it is a sign that things are moving in the right direction.

China has also cracked down on cryptocurrency mining in several provinces, flooding the market with used graphics cards. However, these are typically sold in large quantities, and one should be wary of cards that have been running 24/7 for most of the year.

Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, AMD graphics cards will be available at reasonable prices. In particular, the latest rumors suggest that the Radeon RX 6600 XT and RX 6600 GPUs are expected to be available this August.