GPD one of the main manufacturers of portable consoles with x86 hardware on the market, has accused AMD of breaching its contract by not supplying Ryzen APUs on time. Specifically, the fact that AMD has not fulfilled its part of the agreement has made its new top-of-the-range console, the WIN Max 2 2023are affected with a delay on the date of your shipments.
Although GPD offers models based on Intel processors, the company’s default choice is AMD due to the power of its integrated graphics. Obviously, this will affect the credibility of the company, and with Meteor Lake that promise to compete head-to-head in graphical power with the AMD Ryzen APUs, this disagreement could lead GPD to now evaluate the possibility of consider Intel as a first option when launching a future portable console.
GPD publicly accused AMD: their delays are linked to the fact that they have not fulfilled their contract
Evidently, GPD publicly accused AMD of not having supplied the number of APUs that they had offered under contract. This public accusation was linked to the fact that the company had had to announce to its customers that shipments of its consoles would be delayed. You can imagine having paid more than 1,000 euros for a console and not receiving it when you had stipulated. That is why GPD distanced itself by indicating that they cannot meet delivery deadlines because AMD has prevented them from doing so.
The biggest problem is that GPD did not receive the expected APUs since AMD would have sent them to another partner. Nothing indicates that AMD has problems with the manufacturing or shortage of these APUs. So it basically sold GPD in front of its users. This is a serious problem, since GPD is supported mainly by Indiegogo “patrons”. If you gain a reputation for offering an expensive product, and even then, you are not able to meet deadlines, it means that in its future launch, very few people would consider buying a console from this brand.
WIN Max 2 shipping delay notice
Dear users.
We are very sorry to inform some of our users whose orders have been blocked but not yet shipped: The original plan is that we can ship all blocked orders, but there is no stock now. The reason is that our supplier [AMD] violated the agreementand the actual number of 7840U APUs that must be delivered to us is different from the previously agreed amount did not match. As it was delivered in batches, they could not deliver the second batch of 7840U.
It has been AMD that has breached the contract and has not been able to deliver it to our previous supplier as agreed, so now we cannot carry out production. We apologize for the inconvenience caused.
The problems are linked to the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U APU
We are talking about an APU for laptops, but it has been adopted very quickly for the portable console industry. It is a Ryzen Z1 Extreme, but capable of operating at a lower starting TDP. This is why all variants of the GPD WIN Max 2 console based on this AMD APU are affected by delays.
GPD would also have problems with the AMD Ryzen 5 7640U. Basically, because they can only offer this console in its variant with 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of capacity.
