According to Taiwanese media, Bitcoin ASIC makers have started reducing the production of their top-end machines as cryptocurrency prices have been in freefall over the last couple of months. This has, in turn, allowed NVIDIA and AMD to increase their share of 7nm capacity at TSMC. However, instead of increasing the share of GPUs, AMD is giving an increased priority to the Epyc Milan/Rome server processors due to growing demand from the data center segment.
Although the change in the capacity allocation isn’t that significant, it has resulted in a slight decrease in the production capacity of the Radeon RX 6000 (RDNA 2/Navi 2X) graphics cards and certain Ryzen APUs [than what had been originally allocated]. This change is primarily due to two reasons. Firstly, as the profits from mining fall, and the market is flooded with second-hand devices, AMD doesn’t want a repeat of 2018-19 when the channel was filled with excess inventory. There weren’t that many Navi 2X GPUs produced in the first place, but prices for graphics cards have already started falling and there’s no telling where it will end this time.
Secondly, since the Navi GPUs are monolithic chips with a large L3 cache, they have a much slimmer profit margin compared to the Ryzen and Epyc CPUs. As such, it makes much more sense for AMD to focus on the latter, rather than the former. Regardless, we expect the supply of the Radeon RX 6000 to improve in the coming months, especially the RX 6700 XT and the upcoming 6600 series. The higher-end Navi 21-based products should see a notable increase in supply towards the end of the year.
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