AMD sends word this afternoon that the company is delaying the launch of their Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors. The first Zen 5 architecture-based desktop chips were slated to launch next week, on July 31^st. But citing quality issues that are significant enough that AMD is even pulling back stock already sent to distributors, AMD is delaying the launch by one to two weeks. The Ryzen 9000 launch will now be a staggered launch, with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X launching on August 8^th, while the Ryzen 9 9900X and flagship Ryzen 9 9950X will launch a week after that, on August 15^th.

The exceptional announcement, officially coming from AMD’s SVP and GM of Computing and Graphics, Jack Huynh, is short and to the point. Ahead of the launch, AMD found that “the initial production units that were shipped to our channel partners did not meet our full quality expectations.” And, as a result, the company has needed to delay the launch in order to rectify the issue.

Meanwhile, because AMD had already distributed chips to their channel partners – distributors who then filter down to retailers and system builders – this is technically a recall as well, as AMD needs to pull back the first batch of chips and replace them with known good units. That AMD has to essentially take a do-over on initial chip distribution is ultimately what’s driving this delay; it takes the better part of a month to properly seed retailers for a desktop CPU launch with even modest chip volumes, so AMD has to push the launch out to give their supply chain time to catch up.

For the moment, there are no further details on what the quality issue with the first batch of chips is, how many are affected, or what any kind of fix may entail. Whatever the issue is, AMD is simply taking back all stock and replacing it with what they’re calling “fresh units.”

Importantly, however, this announcement is only for the Ryzen 9000 desktop processors, and not the Ryzen AI 300 mobile processors (Strix Point), which are still slated to launch next week. A mobile chip recall would be a much bigger issue (they’re in finished devices that would need significant labor to rework), but also, both the new desktop and mobile Ryzen processors are being made on the same TSMC N4 process node, and have significant overlap due to their shared use of the Zen 5 architecture. To be sure, mobile and desktop are very different dies, but it does strongly imply that whatever the issue is, it’s not a design flaw or a fabrication flaw in the silicon itself.

That AMD is able to re-stage the launch of the desktop Ryzen 9000 chips so quickly – on the order of a few weeks – further points to an issue much farther down the line. If indeed the issue isn’t at the silicon level, then that leaves packaging and testing as the next most likely culprit. Whether that means AMD’s packaging partners had some kind of issue assembling the multi-die chips, or if AMD found some other issue that warrants further checks remains to be seen. But it will definitely be interesting to eventually find out the backstory here. In particular I’m curious if AMD is being forced to throw out the first batch of Ryzen 9000 desktop chips entirely, or if they just need to send them through an additional round of QA to pull bad chips.

It’s also interesting here that AMD’s new launch schedule has essentially split the Ryzen 9000 stack in two. The company’s higher-end chips, which incorporate two CCDs, are delayed an additional week over the lower-end units with their single CCD. By their very nature, multi-CCD chips require more time to validate (there’s a whole additional die to test), but they also require more CCDs to assemble. So it’s a toss-up right now whether the additional week for the high-end chips is due to a supply bottleneck, or a chip testing bottleneck.

The silver lining to all of this, at least, is that AMD found the issue before any of the faulty chips made their ways into the hands of consumers. Though the need to re-stage the launch still throws a rather large wrench into marketing efforts of AMD and their partners, a post-launch recall would have been far more disastrous on multiple levels, not to mention that it would have given the company a significant black eye. Something that arch-rival Intel is getting to experience for themselves this week.

In any case, this will certainly go down as one of the more interesting AMD desktop chip launches – and the chips haven’t actually made it out the door yet. We’ll have more on the subject as further details are released. And look forward to chip reviews soon – just not on July 31^st as originally planned.