AMD announced this afternoon that it will delay the launch of Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors. The first batch of desktop chips based on the Zen5 architecture were originally scheduled to be available next week (July 31). However, due to quality issues, AMD even took back the inventory that had been sent to distributors, so the launch will be delayed by one to two weeks.
Now, Ryzen 9000's availability will be staggered, with Ryzen 59600X and Ryzen 79700X launching on August 8, while Ryzen 99900X and the flagship Ryzen 99950X will be available a week later, on August 15.
Jack Huynh, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's Computing and Graphics Division, officially announced this special news, and the message was short and straightforward. Ahead of the launch, AMD discovered that "initial production units delivered to channel partners did not fully meet our quality expectations." Therefore, the company needs to delay the launch in order to correct this problem.
Also, since AMD has distributed the chips to its channel partners (i.e. distributors, who in turn distribute them to retailers and system builders), this is technically a recall as AMD needs to take back the first batch of chips and replace them with known good chips. AMD had to restart its initial chip distribution efforts, which was ultimately the reason for the delay in this recall; even if the chip volume was not large, it would take a month for AMD to get the right chips to retailers, so AMD had to delay the launch to give the supply chain time to catch up.
There are currently no further details on what the quality issue is with the first batch of chips, how many chips are affected, or what any fixes might involve. Whatever the problem was, AMD simply took back all the inventory and replaced it with what they called "new products."
But importantly, what was announced this time was only the Ryzen 9000 desktop processor, not the Ryzen AI 300 mobile processor (StrixPoint), which is still scheduled to be released next week. Recalls of mobile chips will be a bigger problem (they are shipped in finished devices and require a lot of labor to rework), and the new desktop and mobile Ryzen processors are both manufactured on the same TSMC N4 process node, so there is significant overlap due to the shared use of the Zen5 architecture. To be sure, mobile and desktop chips are completely different, but it also strongly suggests that whatever the problem is, it doesn't come from a design flaw or manufacturing flaw in the chip itself.
AMD's ability to reschedule the launch of its desktop Ryzen 9000 chips so quickly -- on the order of a few weeks -- is further evidence that the problem lies more peripherally. If the problem is indeed not at the chip level, then packaging and testing are the next most likely culprits. Does this mean that AMD's packaging partners are having some kind of problem assembling multiple chips, or that AMD has discovered other issues that require further inspection. It's unclear whether AMD was forced to destroy the entire first batch of Ryzen 9000 desktop chips, or if they would just have to send those chips through an extra round of QA to weed out bad chips.
What's also interesting is that AMD's new release schedule splits the Ryzen 9000 series in two. The company's high-end chips using dual CCDs are delayed by one week longer than low-end chips using a single CCD. By their very nature, multi-CCD chips take more time to verify (one more entire chip to test), but they also require more CCDs to assemble. So it's unclear whether the extra week required for high-end chips is due to supply bottlenecks or chip testing bottlenecks.
At least AMD discovered the problem before the problematic chips got into consumers' hands. Although the need to reschedule the launch still has a considerable impact on the marketing efforts of AMD and its partners, if a recall is carried out after the launch, it will cause a greater disaster on multiple levels, not to mention a huge negative impact on the company. This week, AMD's arch-rival Intel experienced all of this firsthand.