AMD is readying a pre-launch publicity blitz in less than a fortnight at the New Horizon event in Austin Texas. While that event will provide "an exclusive advance preview of our new 'Zen' CPU ahead of its 2017 Q1 launch," many are hoping, and even expecting, a glimpse of the Vega GPU as a little bonus from AMD.
On Wednesday AMD President & CEO Lisa Su was questioned by analysts about GPU business progress and aspirations. This was at the investor focussed Credit Suisse 20th Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, attended by the AMD boss. Web site WCCF Tech listened in and sifted a very interesting couple of nuggets from the talks that day.
50/50 graphics market share
John Pitzer, Semiconductor Analyst at Credit Suisse put a question to Dr Su, asking about the market progress of Polaris in 2016 and hopes for Vega in 2017. Furthermore, he enquired if AMD could claw back its market share to its previous heights. WCCF Tech transcribed Dr Su's response as follows:
"We have made very good progress I would say in the first couple of quarters this year in terms of graphics. I think it's nice, when you look at graphics it's both in the consumer side on the channel as well as in the OEM business and on the professional graphics market. There's a large opportunity. I think we've gained a good amount of share over the last few quarters, we're going to continue and consistently drive [share growth]. We believe that there's no reason we can't be at 50/50 share overtime, but it will certainly take some time to get there."
Dr Su went on to express her enthusiasm and optimism for AMD growth in graphics. She described the graphics chip market as being "on fire". So far we have only seen the lower end of the market catered for by AMD's Polaris offerings but "our strategy in GPUs is to play across the entire market," affirmed the company CEO.
One final important thing that AMD is acutely aware of is building and enhancing relationships with consumers and other businesses. AMD wants to inspire more loyalty as customers appreciate its hardware and supporting software, and intends to become "very sticky" going forward.
29/71 is the status quo
In our most recent third party sourced report on AMD and Nvidia's respective market shares it was revealed that AMD had 29 per cent of the discrete GPU add-in board (AiB) market. This compares very favourably to a year ago, when it had sunk to under 19 per cent market share.
