Because you've all stopped buying PCs, AMD's wiped $1b+ off expected sales AMD has warned investors its guidance for quarterly revenue was out by $1.1 billion. The Ryzen processor designer is not due to report its Q3 results until November 1, though has nonetheless decided to give Wall Street a taste of its numbers – a move that businesses rarely use unless they have bad news to disclose or feel …
It's the fallacy of the sustained and uninterrupted growth: The illusion that sales can (and must!) increase indefinitely till kingdom come.
Don't dare ask who will buy all this crap: Wars have been fought and lots of people died to ensure "the market" is ever expanding and ready for our products. Because if at some point the market is saturated, everything will collapse. Eternal growth is the base of our economy and no more growth means death. The bubble bursts and the whole Ponzi scheme collapses.
...is making sure people can actually fucking buy it.
AMD is notorious for marketing products then having them never surface.
Radeon VII anyone?
I really like AMD products (I stop short of being a full blown fan boy though, because I have a job to do which means I need to have working kit regardless of who made it) but my god is their stuff (and associated compatible stuff like motherboards) hard to come by.
Sometimes their products are as rare as rocking horse shit. Sure, we've had the pandemic and the associated supply issues there...but come on, AMD CPU's were so rare during that period, I questioned their existence. At no point was it difficult to get hold of some form of Intel CPU...mind you, with Intel it hasn't mattered if you get stuck on the last gen for a long time due to incremental performance improvements.
Aside from stock issues, there is also the price issue. We've reached a point in component pricing where you're better off waiting an extra generation before upgrading / building something new because the benefit of upgrading is outweighed by the saving you'll make by waiting a generation or two.
Thing is, the demand to build PCs or buy pre-built PCs is still out there...it's just too damned expensive / difficult to do it.
Personally, for the last 2 or 3 years, I've been going all in on keeping older kit running for longer when it comes to my clients because it's hard to justify the expense. The staple mid-range machines I'd normally recommend have almost double in price and are only just starting to come down a bit.
It's a similar story in the server market, I priced up a server for a client yesterday that just needed a basic server to run as an FTP server to serve files to their clients...The server I chose was a PowerEdge R250 (pretty much the lowest end for Dell, but ideal for an FTP). The price (with drives, which I always include in Dell quotes because it is worst case scenario pricing for storage) came to around £2,200 (inc VAT). The spec of this box had an entry level Xeon (literally the cheapest Xeon), no hardware RAID and only 8GB RAM. More than you need for a functional FTP server, but nowhere near what I would consider to be £2k worth of kit.
What I have ended up doing is procuring a bunch of old PowerEdge R230 servers (Xeon 1260Lv6 / 32GB RAM / PERC H330 / hotswap backplane) and 4x 4TB Ironwolf drives from Amazon for each. Dell still sells these (albeit at considerably lower spec) on their outlet website for around £650 (8GB RAM, Xeon 1220v5, no backplane and no PERC, no disks).
I was able to sell my own refurbs for £800 each (I'm not going to tell you what the price for the R230's was to me, but it was fucking cheap and I made way more profit than I would have done had they bought a brand new Dell, in fact on a brand new Dell, I'd have made virtually nothing, because the budget is the budget)...refurbing involved stripping it down, cleaning off all the components, replace all the fans, repaste the CPU, bench test the CPU/RAM etc, clean all the connectors with contact cleaner etc etc they are basically in brand new condition.
The reason I sold them two was because they are single PSU and I can't guarantee the life span of those and it would be tricky to buy replacements should they fail at some point, so having two made sense...one as the primary FTP and the other as a mirror. It is a production setup, so a little common sense is required.
Essentially, right now, with loads of firms going down the pan and the market flooding with second hand kit, you can get some wild bargains right now. Ignore the prices on eBay...people selling on there are dreaming!
The main reason for the prices bottoming out is that there is so much kit out there, that the firms doing the liquidations can't get rid of it quickly enough and they run out of space to store it!
A few of the firms I deal with are packed floor to ceiling with mostly servers that are less than 5 years old. Obviously, there is some much older dross knocking about as well, but that stuff is going straight to recycling in most cases...so if you run a home lab with kit in that is 5+ years old, you might start struggling to find parts!
"The first step in selling something... "
What if they don't want to sell desktop CPUs anymore and want to sell only SoCs and APUs? What's the strategy?
The price is why I'm not buying. I like small computers and they now charge more for mITX than ATX which is essentially promoting pollution of the Earth via material+landfill. mITX was never small enough and to be honest I don't need computers as the ones I have now never remind me that they are old.
> AMD is notorious for marketing products then having them never surface.
Well Radeon VII was a particular example of something that no-one in the industry ever expected to be produced in much quantity. It was more of a concept device than anything else so you are right about that, but no-one who really knew what was going on at the time expected them to be produced in large numbers.
Apart from that, when have Zen-based CPUs ever been in short supply? I don't remember any time when AMD released a new generation of CPUs and there being a problem getting hold of them. As for their graphics cards, *all* graphics cards have been expensive to buy and as rare as rocking horse sh*t for a while. That's hardly something you can blame AMD specifically for. Miners have been grabbing everything that hits the shelves from all vendors.
Yes, I couldn't get a 5900x for love nor money for aaaaaaages...so I caved and got a 5800x instead. I could have gone up to a 5950x, but the 5800x was much better value...which is probably why they haven't launched a CPU in that slot this time round...yet.
I was expecting the 5800x to be a dramatic step down from a 5950x but once I got it and started using it...it wasn't at all...in fact over my previous CPU, it was such a massive lift to performance that I questioned why on earth I was willing to spend significantly more money than I ended up doing. I moved from an i7-6700...which is still in use by my oldest son...and probably will be for some time. I can't see myself upgrading from a 5800x any time soon. I reckon I have a good few years left in it yet...unless something arrives that is just such a jump up that I can't avoid it.
The 5800x probably took sales away from the 5950x last time round and rendered the 5900x pretty much pointless. This time around there is no equivalent to the 5800x in terms of price point and relative specs.
I feel sorry for anyone planning an upgrade right now because the whole thing is an absolute shit show right now.
Overprice and massive 4090 GPUs that draw stupid power and kick out insane heat and CPU lineups with "upper mid tier" products suspiciously missing. Even the NVIDIA lineup is technically missing it's usual upper mid tier.
It seems component makers want those upper mid tier buyers to just jump up to the top tier and not have the benefit of a good price / performance balance. You either go all in, or you're essentially downgrading.
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