The absence of the Ryzen 5 5600 and Ryzen 7 5700X from the consumer Zen 3 lineup has been rather glaring. A lot of enthusiasts have been curious as to why AMD still hasn’t launched a sub-$300 SKU, especially considering that Intel already has multiple with Rocket Lake-S: Core i5-11400F, 11500, etc.

Turns out the answer is rather simple: semiconductor shortages. Talking to analysts during the JP Morgan annual conference, AMD CEO, Dr. Lisa Su stated that the chipmaker has been forced to delay the release of budget-class SKUs on both the CPU and GPU sides due to the global shortage of semiconductors. Releasing cheaper and less cores chips in present situation leads to less profits.

For years presstitutes and paid bloggers told us that low end chips become such restricted because only one reason - defects on chip and it is only few chips that can have all the cores working.

It turned out to be huge lie. As soon as AMD had been able to quickly sell lot of high core count chips at premium pricing they never even started offering Ryzen 3 53ХХ, Ryzen 5 5500/5500Х, Ryzen 5 5600, Ryzen 7 5700/5700Х and Ryzen 9 5900. Just because only some chips require limiting chiplet to 6 cores and all else can perfectly run using all 8.