For long, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has remained an underdog to bigger rivals in the semiconductor space. It had made its own share of mistakes, primarily prioritising Artificial Intelligence too much when growth potential was scattered everywhere. It was probably last year that the Santa Clara-based chipmaker earned the attention of rivals Intel (INTC) and NVIDIA (NVDA) when it launched its CPU architecture named Ryzen.
Ryzen turned out to be a revolution with higher number of cores, better IPC performance and coming at a much lower price. AMD’s emergence also marked the end of a period when gamers struggled to get graphic cards due to high prices and unavailability. Which is why we love AMD! A year on, AMD has now unveiled a lineup of next-generation products at Computex 2018 in Taipei, which threatens to take over market share from bigger rivals Nvidia and Intel.
Of the releases, probably the most eye-candy one was the second generation of Ryzen Threadripper. The 32-core 64-thread consumer CPU builds on the prior generation’s success, besides managing to restrict power requirement to 250W despite boasting of improved processing power. All that, while being capable of being air-cooled. It is expected to reach the market by the third quarter of fiscal 2018. Threadripper 2, with higher core count, is expected to pit AMD directly against Intel.
Meanwhile, the other launches of the day – 7nm Radeon Vega GPU as well as Radeon RX Vega 56 and 64 Nano graphics cards – are placed in direct competition with Nvidia. The graphic cards would take on Nvidia’s last year’s releases GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 cards. According to AMD executives, the RX Vega56 card is tailor-made for ice-smooth game-play and can run on Microsoft’s (MSFT) Xbox One X, Xbox One S or any equipped PC. In the meantime, gamers are also keeping their fingers crossed for the launch of Nvidia’s much-touted GeForce GTX 11 Series cards.
According to recent reports, gamers are driving the demand for PCs, which are otherwise seeing lukewarm response. This provides great growth opportunity for both Nvidia and AMD, but with an expanding portfolio, the latter seems to be gaining better pace. A recent survey reveals that AMD’s GPU market share increased to 14.9% from 14.2%, while Intel edged down and Nvidia remained flat.
AMD shares have increased 21% in the past 52 weeks, while Intel has gained 55% and Nvidia is up 75%.