Senior Vice President and General Manager Jack Huynh has now confirmed that AMD is not currently planning to launch a high-end GPU anytime soon. AMD and its rivals are all expected to launch their respective next generation of discreet graphics cards sometime around the coming of the new year, but there have been rumors that Team Red might not release a flagship PC enthusiast GPU this time around. Jack Huynh has now confirmed those rumors, at least for now, via an interview with Tom’s Hardware, by saying that AMD is not currently planning to compete in the PC enthusiast sector as it instead will focus on the more affordable gaming products tiers with the upcoming Radeon RX 8000-Series.
The AMD exec essentially lays out a strategy where the focus is to aim for greater market share with more high-volume sales rather than high-priced top-tier products that only make up a small percentage of sales. AMD sits in a very interesting space for consumer electronics. It already dominates the console segment with its custom APUs for Sony and Microsoft. The gaming handheld market has also seen significant adoption of its APUs as well. Its low-to-mid-tier gaming GPUs compete favorably with NVIDIA and Intel. However, while its high-end GPUs have come a long way with RDNA2, and especially RDNA3, but never quite managed to topple NVIDIA from its throne as king of the GPUs.
Per Tom’s Hardware:
- “So, my number one priority right now is to build scale, to get us to 40 to 50 percent of the market faster.”
- “Do I want to go after 10% of the TAM [Total Addressable Market] or 80%?”
- “But we tried that strategy [King of the Hill] — it hasn’t really grown.”
- “I think building a great product in the client [consumer] market gets us to 20% market share by pure grinding, but to go to 40% is another gear, and that’s the machine I’m trying to build.”
Despite making significant gains with its more affordable products, AMD has not overcome NVIDIA’s 88% dominant share of the discreet GPU market but it sounds like there’s hope the Radeon RX 8000-Series will make greater strides. While Jack clearly emphasizes the focus on the gaming market he does tease enthusiasts by stating AMD does “have a great strategy for the enthusiasts on the PC side,” and that “We’ll be using chiplets, which doesn’t impact what I want to do on scale, but it still takes care of enthusiasts.”
Lastly, he adds that AMD will not forget about its Threadripper and Ryzen 9 processors.