AMD’s Ryzen 5000 chips might have launched back at the start of October, but getting your hands on a chip has proven to be quite the challenge. There have been promises of more stock, but even so, people have been buying the chips faster than AMD can ship them out.
But, it appears that certain countries in Europe might be in luck. Just now, the Netherlands (via Tweakers.net) received huge shipments of the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X, and the Ryzen 9 5950X, with the more affordable chips available in significantly greater quantities. Interestingly, the Ryzen 9 5900X appears to be still troubled by supply issues, but that could be due to its popularity leading to a large number of pre-orders that still need to be fulfilled before the webshops can offer the chips to the general public with next-day delivery. Germany and surrounding countries appear to have received similar shipments.
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Of course, pricing is still a little out of whack, with the 5600X retailing about €370 instead of its European MSRP of €309. The 5800X exchanges hands for about €500. The 5900X isn’t widely in stock, but if it were, it would cost between €750 and €850. The god-tier 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X is selling for a mighty €950. Next-day delivery is also a bit of a false promise at this time, but that’s more due to a local lockdown and the postal services being overburdened.
What Caused These Shortages Again?
Of course, with everyone stuck at home, demand for PC hardware and any gaming-related hardware, in general, is through the roof, but there’s more happening that’s causing AMD’s shortages. For starters, AMD’s foundry partner TSMC is fully at capacity, and it seems one of the issues is that chip packagers can’t get their hands on enough interposers.
Meanwhile, AMD’s chips are also simply the Best CPUs you can buy right now, with a new architecture built on the 7nm process. Meanwhile, Intel is still stuck at 14nm, though Rocket Lake-S will bring a new architecture to the process node. No exact release date is known for Intel’s chips. Still, when they do launch, considering Intel can price aggressively and has much more production capacity than AMD, chances are Rocket Lake will ease some of the demand off AMD, and the CPU situation will normalize.
Fingers crossed.
Unfortunately, there’s no news about when the US will see similar kinds of Ryzen 5000 shipments.