“It’s all about the bad coordination, bad communication, bad support and bad timing to launch this platform in my opinion. With all these issues, none of us could start manufacture the boards sooner. Also, in January and February, all board vendors’ production lines were occupied with Intel 200 series boards before Chinese New Year and tried to ship as much boards as we can to ensure we won’t have stock issues while Asia was on New Year vacation.
In late December, AMD decided to pull in the launch date (it was scheduled to launch in late Q2) and launched it right after Chinese New Year but AMD keep the CPU supply quantity secret from us the whole time. They only shared the data 2 weeks before the launch, we didn’t understand why they were doing it. Also, their BIOS team and engineers were doing terrible jobs on supporting us on the BIOS microcode updates, driver updates, CPU samples for testing. They have done nothing they should have been doing to support the launch platform partners and always delay or give no response on support requests. We were all having huge issues to debug with limited AMD resource support including validating the parts, and fixing the memory clock speed that is all limited by AMD.
In general, it’s been too long for AMD to launch a new CPU, so they forgot how to do it, so they launched the CPU just like they were launching the graphics card. They didn’t care about the platform eco-system, so the eco-system is suffering and stock is delayed.
We are flying in new batches every 3 days to try to fulfill the back orders ASAP, so they should be all back in stock soon. With all the board reviews released, per Newegg and Amazon, the AMD memory limitation issue is slowing down the sales though.
We need your help to feedback that to AMD as well on their supports issues.