even if you won't let anything colored green or blue come within 10 ft of your
PC it's hard to deny that the last few years have been a tough time for AMD
fans aside from very minor incremental
updates we haven't seen any truly new
high-end desktop CPUs and team red is
still getting handily beaten in the GPU Market as well but Hope Springs Eternal
and it looks like there's going to be plenty for AMD fans to get excited about
in 2017 but is it enough to make AMD
competitive to make them more of a Mainstay among PC Gamers and perhaps
most importantly to make them more of that sweet paper that will allow them to
continue to innovate in the future to
answer let's first take a closer look at what AMD is up to on the GPU side of
things today we've seen their Focus Shift from trying to compete directly
against NVIDIA at every segment of the market to competing on value for the
money their new rx480 priced at $200 was
heavily marketed as affordable VR at a
lower price point than NVIDIA was willing to offer this resulted in AMD
shipping 1 and A5 million more discret
desktop gpus in the third quarter of 2016 than they did in the same period in
2015 nearly a 70% increase but can AMD
continue this momentum right now there's
nothing current gen on the high end from AMD but that's set to change very soon
with Vega its next iteration of its Northstar themed gpus which AMD has
already confirmed will be aimed at the high-end and Enthusiast segments while
they won't be able to undercut NVIDIA on price by very much seeing as they
essentially contract with the same third party Fabs to actually manufacture the
chips offering performance similar to a
GTX 1070 or a 1080 at a slightly lower
price could help AMD a great deal especially as it doesn't actually cost
the company as much more as you might
think to make a higher tier GPU than a mid-range or a low tier one which should
improve their profitability although Vega gpus will be
using the same gcn fourth generation architecture as the rx480 they'll be
beefed up with nearly twice as many stream processors which could make the
GPU Wars very interesting come the first
half of next year but what will the AMD
fan pair his or her shiny new Vega GPU
with well AMD's New Zen CPU lineup will
be released soon marking a dramatic shift in AMD's CPU philosophy as well
you see part of the reason AMD lost so much ground in the CPU Market over the
last 5 years is that they focused more on core count meaning that you could buy
a six or an8 core AMD chip for Fairly
cheap but performance per core has
lagged behind Intel often significantly
with high power consumption being yet another cross to bear and since
single-threaded performance is typically more important for gamers and even in
multi-threaded workloads past a certain number of cores as we discovered
recently AMD chips have been a harder
sell especially considering that the AMD
desktop platform at least their high-end FX chipsets haven't been updated in so
long that they lack native support for USB 3
ddr4 PCI Express 3.0 and NVMe ssds and
that's ignoring Intel specific standards that are gaining traction like
Thunderbolt 3 most of that though changes with Zen
as AMD has publicly announced that the focus is squarely on per core
performance along with lower power consumption and early reports seem to
indicate that Zen might be pretty close to Intel's Broadwell family
performance-wise and while Broadwell is
a couple of generations old at this point keep in mind that Intel's
single-threaded improvements from Broad Broadwell to the current generation KB
Lake have been quite minimal as the focus for Intel has been more on
improving the platform overall including graphics performance so the vast
majority of users might be hardpressed to notice too much of a difference
between a red computer and a blue one so
with that in mind AMD pricing the chips correctly could mean users might choose
Zen instead of paying the Intel tax for
a performance boost they might not notice or Intel exclusive Technologies
like Thunderbolt but of course AMD isn't just
a Mainstay in desktop PCS how are things looking for their laptop and console
Endeavors well the good news for AMD is that not only did their sales of laptop
gpus grow in 2016 but AMD gpus were also
included in all 15in models of the new
Apple MacBook Pro which is flying off
the shelves for some reason of course a
small kick in the teeth is that AMD is no longer the only player in the console
Graphics Market with Nintendo switching from a custom AMD chip to an NVIDIA s so
for its new Switch hybrid console back to the original question
though while AMD has some obvious hurdles to clear 2017 looks like it's
going to be a very exciting year if you're all about # better red just don't
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