AMD’s current market position is quite precarious despite making gains in the graphics segment during the last quarter. The root cause of this revolves around the lack of competitive products in the CPU sector, and poor uptake of AMD’s latest graphics architecture. To be clear, The Fury line-up is worthy of praise, and offers great performance but this doesn’t seem to be impacting on AMD’s market share. Perhaps this is down to cost, low yield of HBM or other factors. Unfortunately, the situation doesn’t look like improving any time soon and according to DigiTimes, the company’s market share could hit a new low in the first quarter of 2016. Their sources claimed:
“Demand for standalone graphics cards has already been sluggish given a weak PC market, and the market for standalone grahics cards continues to decline. In the already-shrinking market, AMD’s rival Nvidia has eaten away at its market share.”
“In the PC processor market, AMD’s gap behind Intel has widened. And it remains uncertain whetrher AMD’s next-generation Zen architecture can help the company make a comeback.”
“In the standalone GPU segment, AMD will have to ensure that the launch of its Polaris architecture will be on schedule. Any delays of the launch or performance issues could interrupt its way to recovery.”
While this news is fairly concerning, it’s not unexpected because AMD is preparing for the release of both Zen and Polaris. Once they have updated the CPU and GPU range, there should be significant improvements in the overall market percentage. This is easier said than done, but the upcoming months are essential for AMD’s long-term future. I just hope they can produce something which really shakes up the market, and encourages consumers to purchase their products. Sadly, the company’s financials are pretty abysmal right now although I do expect to see a fightback from AMD in the next few months.
