Will AMD Be Competitive in 2017?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
1,146 words · ~5 min read
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even if you won't let anything colored green or blue come within 10 ft of your
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PC it's hard to deny that the last few years have been a tough time for AMD
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fans aside from very minor incremental
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updates we haven't seen any truly new
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high-end desktop CPUs and team red is
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still getting handily beaten in the GPU Market as well but Hope Springs Eternal
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and it looks like there's going to be plenty for AMD fans to get excited about
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in 2017 but is it enough to make AMD
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competitive to make them more of a Mainstay among PC Gamers and perhaps
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most importantly to make them more of that sweet paper that will allow them to
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continue to innovate in the future to
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answer let's first take a closer look at what AMD is up to on the GPU side of
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things today we've seen their Focus Shift from trying to compete directly
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against NVIDIA at every segment of the market to competing on value for the
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money their new rx480 priced at $200 was
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heavily marketed as affordable VR at a
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lower price point than NVIDIA was willing to offer this resulted in AMD
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shipping 1 and A5 million more discret
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desktop gpus in the third quarter of 2016 than they did in the same period in
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2015 nearly a 70% increase but can AMD
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continue this momentum right now there's
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nothing current gen on the high end from AMD but that's set to change very soon
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with Vega its next iteration of its Northstar themed gpus which AMD has
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already confirmed will be aimed at the high-end and Enthusiast segments while
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they won't be able to undercut NVIDIA on price by very much seeing as they
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essentially contract with the same third party Fabs to actually manufacture the
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chips offering performance similar to a
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GTX 1070 or a 1080 at a slightly lower
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price could help AMD a great deal especially as it doesn't actually cost
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the company as much more as you might
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think to make a higher tier GPU than a mid-range or a low tier one which should
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improve their profitability although Vega gpus will be
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using the same gcn fourth generation architecture as the rx480 they'll be
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beefed up with nearly twice as many stream processors which could make the
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GPU Wars very interesting come the first
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half of next year but what will the AMD
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fan pair his or her shiny new Vega GPU
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with well AMD's New Zen CPU lineup will
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be released soon marking a dramatic shift in AMD's CPU philosophy as well
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you see part of the reason AMD lost so much ground in the CPU Market over the
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last 5 years is that they focused more on core count meaning that you could buy
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a six or an8 core AMD chip for Fairly
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cheap but performance per core has
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lagged behind Intel often significantly
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with high power consumption being yet another cross to bear and since
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single-threaded performance is typically more important for gamers and even in
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multi-threaded workloads past a certain number of cores as we discovered
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recently AMD chips have been a harder
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sell especially considering that the AMD
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desktop platform at least their high-end FX chipsets haven't been updated in so
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long that they lack native support for USB 3
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ddr4 PCI Express 3.0 and NVMe ssds and
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that's ignoring Intel specific standards that are gaining traction like
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Thunderbolt 3 most of that though changes with Zen
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as AMD has publicly announced that the focus is squarely on per core
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performance along with lower power consumption and early reports seem to
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indicate that Zen might be pretty close to Intel's Broadwell family
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performance-wise and while Broadwell is
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a couple of generations old at this point keep in mind that Intel's
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single-threaded improvements from Broad Broadwell to the current generation KB
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Lake have been quite minimal as the focus for Intel has been more on
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improving the platform overall including graphics performance so the vast
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majority of users might be hardpressed to notice too much of a difference
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between a red computer and a blue one so
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with that in mind AMD pricing the chips correctly could mean users might choose
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Zen instead of paying the Intel tax for
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a performance boost they might not notice or Intel exclusive Technologies
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like Thunderbolt but of course AMD isn't just
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a Mainstay in desktop PCS how are things looking for their laptop and console
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Endeavors well the good news for AMD is that not only did their sales of laptop
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gpus grow in 2016 but AMD gpus were also
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included in all 15in models of the new
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Apple MacBook Pro which is flying off
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the shelves for some reason of course a
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small kick in the teeth is that AMD is no longer the only player in the console
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Graphics Market with Nintendo switching from a custom AMD chip to an NVIDIA s so
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for its new Switch hybrid console back to the original question
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though while AMD has some obvious hurdles to clear 2017 looks like it's
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going to be a very exciting year if you're all about # better red just don't
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