According to insiders, AMD is stopping production of high-end RDNA 4 GPUs to create more space for AI chip manufacturing.

A combination of two different reports all point in the same direction that AMD may only be focusing on the mid-range and budget for its latest generation of GPU, RDNA 4. The high-end chips, the successors to the current AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, will be a long time coming. According to both insiders, the rest of the line-up will appear in 2024.

AMD wants to shift all production capacities of chip manufacturer TSMC to GPGPU and FPGA products. There is currently high demand for AI chips and the margins are extremely high. Less good news for gamers, but more economically sensible.

TSMC warned earlier this month of a shortage of high-end AI chips like those from Nvidia and AMD. The problem, however, is not the number of chips TSMC can roll off the assembly line, but rather the insufficient capacity to package chips. packaging or PackagingIn this context, it stands for the connection of all components in the chips.

TSMC has already pumped $3 billion into a new facility that will focus on packaging technology. Today the chip manufacturer speaks of a production backlog of 18 months. Given the current AI hype, there’s a good chance that this gap will get even bigger.

Data processing and data protection

AMD has made such decisions in the past to shift production capacity for high-end chips elsewhere. In 2016, the mid-range RX 480 GPU from the Polaris family was the best GPU from AMD’s stable for a long time. The boring RX 580 followed later, which was also not high-end. Even in the current generation, AMD has no answer to the graphics performance of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, a conscious decision by the manufacturer.

On the other hand, Nvidia may no longer focus on the classic GPU market in the coming years and fully focus on AI. The RTX 50 series is scheduled to see the light of day in 2025, but even there the high-end card could be scrapped to make room for the current Nvidia H100 accelerator, which is extremely popular and at which Nvidia hallucinatory margins. It’s all speculation, but the AI ​​hype is turning both AMD and Nvidia on their head.