AMD have confirmed they’re “ramping up production” of graphics playing cards to deal with the shortfall of GPUs within the channel, however have reiterated main scarcity in reminiscence manufacturing is affecting the variety of playing cards accessible, and never simply due to these accursed miners.
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Lisa Su took cost of their current earnings call to debate their 2017 financials and, after all, a number of the questions that got here up surrounded the inexorable rise of cryptocurrency mining and the vanishing shares of graphics playing cards that has accompanied it.
She has largely been attempting to downplay the cryptocurrency windfall of miners shopping for up all of the Radeon GPUs that hit the market, claiming that it’s nonetheless solely within the “mid-single digit percentage” of their annual income. That mentioned, it accounts for round $47m value of the income progress within the Computing and Graphics section of the enterprise.
That’s a 3rd of the $140m progress that section offered the corporate final yr. Given the equal footing the GPU and CPU elements now appear to have alongside this mining income progress, perhaps AMD should be renaming this section to one thing just like the Computing, Graphics, and Environmentally Destructive Money Grabbing section. But perhaps I am simply being destructive within the face of the present GPU disaster stealing away all of the gaming playing cards.
“I don’t want that to take away from the fact that we had significant growth in the GPU business outside of blockchain,” says Dr. Su. “As we really ramp our Vega product line, we just ramped our GPU compute product line, as we ramped Apple, and so those are all important pieces of our GPU story.”
But actually once we’re speaking about GPUs it’s not possible to not speak concerning the influence of the blockchain, the miners, and the graphics card prospectors. It is probably excellent news that AMD need to ramp up manufacturing, however as they are saying there’s a restrict to what they’ll do themselves.
“Relative to just where we are in the market today, for sure the GPU channel is lower than we would like it to be,” says Dr. Su. “So we’re ramping up our manufacturing.
“At this level we aren’t restricted by silicon, per se, so our foundry companions are supplying us. There are shortages in reminiscence, and I believe that’s true throughout the board, whether or not you might be speaking about GDDR5, otherwise you’re speaking about excessive bandwidth reminiscence. We proceed to work via that with our reminiscence companions, and that will likely be definitely one of many key elements as we undergo 2018.”
Reading between the traces it looks as if graphics card manufacturing goes to be a sticking level all through 2018, not simply due to cryptomining, but in addition as a result of there was such a shortfall in reminiscence manufacturing.
This isn’t excellent news for anybody and probably explains why there are unlikely to be any new AMD graphics playing cards being created this yr, apart from just a few 7nm AMD Vega playing cards.
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