AMD is turning its back on flagship gaming GPUs — to chase AI first
Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge
AMD is saying the quiet part out loud: it’s now prioritizing AI chips ahead of flagship GPUs for gamers. The company’s just laid out a new business strategy, where it will merge its RDNA gaming graphics and CNDA data center efforts into a single universal “UDNA” that’s aimed at AI first.
In two interviews with Tom’s Hardware (you’ll definitely want to read both), AMD computing and graphics boss Jack Huynh doesn’t beat around the bush. With gaming graphics, he explains, the goal is now building scale and market share at lower price points — not the “King of the Hill” flagship GPUs that haven’t convinced enough buyers to leave Nvidia behind.
Here’s the key passage from the first interview:
Tom’s Hardware: Price point-wise, you have leadership, but you won’t go after the flagship market?
Jack Huynh: One day, we may. But my priority right now is to build scale for AMD. Because without scale right now, I can’t get the developers. If I tell developers, ‘I’m just going for 10 percent of the market share,’ they just say, ‘Jack, I wish you well, but we have to go with Nvidia.’ So, I have to show them a plan that says, ‘Hey, we can get to 40% market share with this strategy.’ Then they say, ‘I’m with you now, Jack. Now I’ll optimize on AMD.’ Once we get that, then we can go after the top.
And yet, “King of the Hill” is exactly what AMD wants to build for the AI data center, he says, because that’s where AMD already has substantial market share with its EPYC CPUs and thinks it can grow by selling the best data center GPUs, too.
“Don’t worry, I love gaming. When I present to the board, I say gaming is a strategic pillar in my strategy,” Huynh told Tom’s Hardware later in the interview.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, that’s probably because AMD is following rival Nvidia’s lead — in more ways than one.
I wrote in July that AMD is becoming an AI chip company, just like Nvidia, based on its financial reports alone, which showed that half the company’s sales are now data center products. Both companies have now accelerated their entire businesses to release new silicon architectures yearly, far faster than ever before. In the Tom’s Hardware interview about AMD’s UDNA, Huynh now reveals he wants to chase the success of Nvidia’s own universal CUDA platform as well.
While there’s reason to think a faster pace of development is good for everyone who wants any kind of chip because innovations and possibly entire GPUs will trickle down, AMD has just — unsurprisingly — revealed that it can’t produce every kind of chip at once. Nvidia, too, might possibly prioritize data center chips over gaming ones. Its next wave of GPUs is arriving later than usual, period, and there’s a substantial incentive for Nvidia to sell every graphics chip it can into a more lucrative market.
But I do like the idea of AMD leading in value-oriented GPUs again. Both because GPUs had been getting unreasonably expensive compared to their performance gains even before the AI craze and because Nvidia’s had some particularly ugliness in the $300–$400 segment that most PC gamers wind up choosing from. I want to see AMD win me away from my Nvidia 3060 Ti — if it can.
Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge
AMD is saying the quiet part out loud: it’s now prioritizing AI chips ahead of flagship GPUs for gamers. The company’s just laid out a new business strategy, where it will merge its RDNA gaming graphics and CNDA data center efforts into a single universal “UDNA” that’s aimed at AI first.
In two interviews with Tom’s Hardware (you’ll definitely want to read both), AMD computing and graphics boss Jack Huynh doesn’t beat around the bush. With gaming graphics, he explains, the goal is now building scale and market share at lower price points — not the “King of the Hill” flagship GPUs that haven’t convinced enough buyers to leave Nvidia behind.
Here’s the key passage from the first interview:
Tom’s Hardware: Price point-wise, you have leadership, but you won’t go after the flagship market?
Jack Huynh: One day, we may. But my priority right now is to build scale for AMD. Because without scale right now, I can’t get the developers. If I tell developers, ‘I’m just going for 10 percent of the market share,’ they just say, ‘Jack, I wish you well, but we have to go with Nvidia.’ So, I have to show them a plan that says, ‘Hey, we can get to 40% market share with this strategy.’ Then they say, ‘I’m with you now, Jack. Now I’ll optimize on AMD.’ Once we get that, then we can go after the top.
And yet, “King of the Hill” is exactly what AMD wants to build for the AI data center, he says, because that’s where AMD already has substantial market share with its EPYC CPUs and thinks it can grow by selling the best data center GPUs, too.
“Don’t worry, I love gaming. When I present to the board, I say gaming is a strategic pillar in my strategy,” Huynh told Tom’s Hardware later in the interview.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, that’s probably because AMD is following rival Nvidia’s lead — in more ways than one.
I wrote in July that AMD is becoming an AI chip company, just like Nvidia, based on its financial reports alone, which showed that half the company’s sales are now data center products. Both companies have now accelerated their entire businesses to release new silicon architectures yearly, far faster than ever before. In the Tom’s Hardware interview about AMD’s UDNA, Huynh now reveals he wants to chase the success of Nvidia’s own universal CUDA platform as well.
While there’s reason to think a faster pace of development is good for everyone who wants any kind of chip because innovations and possibly entire GPUs will trickle down, AMD has just — unsurprisingly — revealed that it can’t produce every kind of chip at once. Nvidia, too, might possibly prioritize data center chips over gaming ones. Its next wave of GPUs is arriving later than usual, period, and there’s a substantial incentive for Nvidia to sell every graphics chip it can into a more lucrative market.
But I do like the idea of AMD leading in value-oriented GPUs again. Both because GPUs had been getting unreasonably expensive compared to their performance gains even before the AI craze and because Nvidia’s had some particularly ugliness in the $300–$400 segment that most PC gamers wind up choosing from. I want to see AMD win me away from my Nvidia 3060 Ti — if it can.