People keep calling such suspicion "conspiracy theory" as if it's rare of unlikely. Intel in particular has been fined multiple times for this exact practice. Maybe they are back at it- if I were the regulator, I would at least take a look at the issue.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/184323-intel-stuck-wit...

Conspiracy theories just need to be theories of conspiracy. It carries an implication of implausibility only because of popular perception. e.g. TV and movies like to show a "conspiracy theorist" as a person struggling with paranoia who has outlandish theories and no credibility.

Real, mundane conspiracies are numerous, and there are probably some outlandish ones, too. Every proven conspiracy must have started with someone's theory, if not an unprompted admission, so it's not always wrong to theorize. It's just silly to dedicate more than a little brain space*time to theories you've got no evidence for or hope of proving, conspiracy or otherwise.

You are correct about the dictionary definition of the word, but in popular parlance the phrase "conspiracy theory" has a massive negative connotation. I have literally never in my life seen someone use the phrase without intending to imply "crazy/unprovable/etc".

As a sort of recursive aside, the particular strength of the modern connotations of conspiracy theory are supposed to be a result of CIA propaganda produced to help cover up mkUltra.

The common parlance is very problematic. Anyone can see it is in fact a conspiracy theory, but if it's true, you're not supposed to call it that? How would you know?

Using conspiracy theory as a derogaratory term is a form of doublespeak that shield the conspirators and their conspiracies.

I, for one, will not stop calling conspiracy theories conspiracy theories, regardless whether they are true. Actually, especially when they are true.

Further, the naked word "conspiracy" is itself trending towards this meaning.

"It's not a conspiracy if it is not illegal." By definition.

Garden-variety corruption doesn't need a conspiracy. The US is today the world leader in high-level, fully legal corruption. It took many decades to get there, but it will take even longer to choke it off, if we ever do.

We even elected an out-and-out con man to the presidency. Russia wishes it could be so corrupt, but just doesn't have the money for it. China does, but its corruption is mostly still technically illegal.

A lot of garden variety corruption such as this is actually illegal in the US.

However, you can also form a conspiracy to commit a legal act if it’s got some negative stigma your trying to avoid. For example students may conspire to lower the bar when graded on a bell curve.

A conspiracy theory is any suggestion that two or more people have conspired together to do something. It’s recently become a synonym for “anything I believe to be false”, but that’s not really what it means at all.

I really dislike the use of "conspiracy theory" as a thought stopper. Conspiracies and other underhanded behavior absolutely does exist. The FBI has an entire conspiracy division dedicated to organized crime.

The conspiracy theories that people usually mean by that term are the silly ridiculous ones like Qanon, outlandish "secret space program" stuff, we didn't land on the moon, etc.

I don't think that this is the reason this time.

I have a Ryzen 5950x system and like many other owners I suffer from poor stability. My machine crashes several times a week with CPU errors.

This seems to be the result of poor BIOSes from AMD and their partners, more so than fab faults - reddit is full of people who still have issues after their 3rd RMA.

I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole if I was Dell.

Very often, when Windows crashes due to hardware shenanigans, it writes a minidump into c:/Windows/Minidump folder. You can use WinDbg to see what happened. Sometimes the problem is faulty RAM or similar random fails, nothing interesting there, but more often the problem is specific piece of hardware, the minidump then tells which driver has crashed and what it was doing when it happened.

Counter anecdote, but I run the Ryzen 9 5950X on dedicated servers with Ubuntu 20.04, and they are as stable as they should be.

Funny, never had an issue with mine. Bad stick of ram caused a few issues, but when it was replaced all’s been well.

I have a 5950X as well and it's only mostly stable. I've been running at stock with just PBO enabled and it's mostly fine. It's not so unstable I regret building it since it almost always only reboots and logs a WHEA error when I'm not using it for some reason.

For sudden reboot issues, could be some power protections tripping? For me that showed up as shutdowns (that require turning the PSU off for a minute), but maybe depending on various components and could result in reboots as well?

PBO seems to result in some wild power spikes that don't ever happen with manual static OC. Try raising various overcurrent limits, that worked for me.

Not sure, it only happens though (9.9/10) when the system is idle so it could still be power delivery related but in the other direction.

I have a 5800X and I hadn’t even heard of it. But the supply chain thing seems plausible — it’s still hard to get your hands on Zen 3.

Wow. Hope it gets fixed soon. I’d be livid about this even if I only used the machine in the off hours.

I installed the new beta BIOS update a week ago and since then my machine is been ROCK solid.

Interestingly, my fan is running harder now; whilst CPU usage is low but spiking on 1-2 cores. It never did that before; so maybe the problem was caused by a thermal bug in the bios.

It tends to crash when idle, and the machine is such an enormous improvement over anything Intel have made that I'm happy overall.

The issues with the BIOS will be solved and I'm not an overclocker.

Must be Windows since I never had problems with my Pop!_OS installation

lucky me never had issues with my 5950x (windows, x570 taichi). That being said, TDP 105w is bs.

Oh nooooo, your new top-of-the-line processor has a lower TDP than average-good processors from a few years ago! How absolutely horrible.

/s, in case that wasn't blatantly obvious.

That is not the issue, the issue is that AMD advertise 2700x and 5950x with the same TDP, so at the very least that should means that they both work fine when using the same cooling solution, which is not the case. Using my previous cooler 5950x was throttling at 100 Celsius.

TDP is just now a marketing term. We all know that the real value is when the CPU is boosted.

I believe the real answer is between column A and column B. It would not surprise me to learn that Intel has exclusive product agreements with certain manufacturers top shelf products like the Thinkpad X1, Surface Pro, and the Dell XPS. Long before the shortage, people have been wondering why they can't buy any of these products with a Ryzen CPU. A Ryzen Thinkpad X1 would be an instant purchase for me personally.

However, there is no denying that AMD is having supply issues and is arguably mismanaging the supply they do have with their constant paper launches.

I believe the column A, column B description is apt. For sure AMD is struggling with supply-chain issues, but despite that, they are still managing to lead and stay afloat in terms of tech and mindshare.

These unfair practices by OEMs and Intel serve to exacerbate that problem and will make it harder for AMD to gather greater marketshare as well as mindshare which they could have otherwise reaped when supplies are greater. It's a double-whammy misfortune for AMD in that case, which they don't need as their tech really is advancing past Intel in many ways.

Yea, would love a ThinkPad with amd and 32gb of memory (looks like they now can go to 32gb, but think they were all soldered 16gb last time I checked). Not quite as pretty as a Mac, but probably they best laptop keyboard I've used.

Are there any USB 4 Ryzen laptops ? If there are it must be a very recent thing. AMD has only been viable in laptops for a short while and with limited availability - I suspect they are going to start to show up in premium laptops once they start becoming more common place - just look at the delays between desktop and laptop releases - it's obvious laptops are not a priority for AMD

This is not the impression of many review sites – a lot of the premium Ryzen laptop offerings from certain OEMs (not the big ones) like Asus and others out of Asia are amongst the top performers and have excellent features.

The issue at hand is that other, bigger OEMs are not putting AMD hardware into their best designs and thus yielding less than stellar performance or features. There are still cases of high-end Ryzen mobile CPUs being put into single-channel configurations!

I've looked at G15 Ryzen - it's USB 3.2 and sould out - so no USB 4.0 and limited availability like I said. I don't have any inside scoops into this industry but it could easily be that they are putting the new/untested parts in to lower tier products and reserving top tier ones for the tested configuration with a partner they know can deliver. Put it simply - X1 with AMD would probably sell out in a week, then they would be stuck with people waiting for that one over Intel, and they would cross Intel who still supplies them the majority of chips - sounds like a lose-lose to me.

I'd like to get a top tier AMD ultra portable for sure (eg. a Surface Pro) but AMD seems completely owhervelmed by demand in all areas and they prioirtise laptops the lowest (from their own release timelines and previous statements)

If there's no supply, then simply don't offer the product. However, Alienware, a Dell property, doing as described in this article, is not surprising at all. Dell got in big trouble for their behind-the-scenes favoritism of Intel [0].

The offerings of Ryzen laptops tells a similar story, even before the supply shortages of late. They are only now escaping their shells, but large OEMs still give the best specs to Intel-powered laptops. Better offerings come from the smaller vendors.

[0] https://fortune.com/2007/02/15/suit-intel-paid-dell-up-to-1-...

It's not a conspiracy theory to suggest something that companies do all the time, and that intel regularly has and will probably continue to do.

#2 does not explain the single channel DDR thing.

> #2 does not explain the single channel DDR thing.

Dell has done that on Intel systems for as far as I can remember. Buy the cheapest machine they sell and it's par for the course. This isn't something they do to nerf AMD performance, it's something they do to hit a particular price point, and they always have.

Using the phrase "conspiracy theory" to simply describe theories about conspiracies is pretty common nowadays, the phrase doesn't have an inherently perojative connotation. Just because it's true does not mean it is not a conspiracy theory.

Study showing the phrase "conspiracy theory" doesn't alter people's judgements of a situation: https://psmag.com/news/has-conspiracy-theory-lost-its-negati...

That study is interesting, but us an extremely synthetic testing environment, where everything in the experiment group was called a "consipiracy theory" in a synthetic research prompt, not measuring how peopld respond to actual usage of the term. "Being in a study" may have as large an effect on the result as "attitude toward the term "conspiracy theory".

if you wanted the non-perjorative form you would say simply "conspiracy" without the word "theory".

In the past, Intel simply paid your marketing campaign when you advertised its products. Remember how every manufactor had fullpage advertisements of Intel PCs in every magazine you could buy?

My bet is they're giving dell a much better price and dell makes more money off those systems making it an incentive instead of pressure.

Intel fabbing their own chips gives them a lot more room for profit than amd in the end price - basically you could give the equivalent of half tsmc's cut to an OEM and still make more money than amd per chip.

Intel provides backend rebates to channels or even large commercial end users (usually if you use Intel ssd) for exclusivity. AMD does the same — I’m sure HP has favored pricing.

As someone who bought large numbers of devices in the last year, I would say that the AMD devices had more supply chain issues than any other devices, from thin clients to desktops to laptops.

That may not mean it’s an AMD thing, those issues may well be due to the OEM as many devices/components are constrained.

Intel have heavily ramped up their consumer facing marketing push. There’s credence to the crumbs

> The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that Intel must be applying heavy-handed pressure to OEMs to keep them in line long enough for Intel to release a better architecture in a couple of years.

But what kind of pressure can Intel even apply? Intel CPUs are more expensive and have sub-par performance? Why would any OEM favor them?

"Hi Dell, this is Intel calling. You know how you are one of the biggest computer hardware vendors out there and we give you 30% off on our stuff because you sell insane volumes of it? Yeah we're gonna have to stop doing that if you continue this worrying trend of selling more and more of those AMD chips. We did the math and this will actually hurt you more than you could bring in on the AMD stuff. Ok thanks bye now"

Or maybe the other way around

"We'll give you 40% off instead of 30 if you stop moving so many AMD chips."

It is probably worth while for Intel to do things like this for now and stop the bleeding while AMD is ahead for once.

See my sibling comment. Intel has applied incentives to OEMs before to give them preferential treatment. Dell got caught, but it's likely it's happened with others based on the same pattern existing elsewhere.

Intel had(has?) a practice of giving OEMs a discount if they only sell Intel chips.

"we will not sell you any of these chips unless you agree to exclusivity with our chips for dual channel DDR"

They have an inferior product. Dell could just call their bluff and go AMD exclusive.

And sell how many systems before running out of inventory?

The public perception is still that Intel is superior. If you don't have Intel products available or with a competitive price, you will lose market share.

Remember that most people are tech illiterate (or not savy enough) to know/care about technical details more than they trust marketing and brands.