AMD's Ryzen Chips Facing Some Problems

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. AMD shares are up 14.3 percent this week after Apple Inc AAPL revealed AMD’s Radeon Vega Graphics card will be used in the company’s newest iMac Pro.

Unfortunately for AMD bulls, the momentum could be short-lived after reports have surfaced that the company’s Ryzen chips are experiencing problems.

“Discussions in industry forums for gamers and semiconductor professionals describe chips failing due to potential segment faults with AMD’s new Ryzen processor,” Detwiler Fenton analyst Dan Nenni wrote Wednesday morning.

“We are hearing that even with the latest BIOS there are intermittent crashes which are very problematic and may be hard to debug.”

Related Link: Advanced Micro Devices Continues To Rally

The issues are reportedly impacting Linux distributions such as CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch.

Detwiler Fenton has heard that AMD targeted high-end gaming companies using Linux to test the waters on Ryzen before expanding to Windows in the future. The idea behind the strategy, Nenni says, would be to target users that are most likely to have demanding workloads to identify any potential performance problems.

These types of bugs are relatively common during the hardware development phase, but Nenni says that problems with Ryzen chips seem to be persisting even after BIOS upgrades.

AMD is reportedly aware of the issues and has asked customers not to “open new tickets” related to the problems. Detwiler Fenton noted a software revision could create a fix.

The worst-case scenario for AMD would be an expensive chip re-spin, which would take up to six months to complete and would likely be an expensive process, Nenni said.

AMD investors don’t seem to be too worried about the issues. Shares were up about 2.8 percent at $12.37 about an hour before Wednesday's closing bell.

Image Credit: By Rico Shen, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons