AMD abandoned the pursuit of Nvidia and relied on the mass GPU market

AMD has changed its strategy, shifting its focus from the limited flagship segment of graphics cards for enthusiasts to expanding its presence in the GPU market. The company’s new goal is to increase market share from the current 10% to an ambitious 40-50%. To achieve this, with the next series of video cards, AMD intends to focus on the mainstream segment, covering 80% of the market, instead of competing in the narrow niche of high-performance GPUs.

Image source: AMD

So far, AMD has not officially confirmed the rumors about the cancellation of the development of the Navi 41/4C GPU, the flagship chipset with RDNA 4 architecture. AMD initially planned to challenge Nvidia in the high-end segment, but then, based on unspecified reasons, abandoned these plans. Instead, the company appears to be focusing on developing the Navi 48 and Navi 44 GPUs, aimed at a more mainstream market. Notably, the names of these GPUs have already been confirmed by AMD in open source driver patches and shipping documents.

It is important to note that AMD’s pivot towards the mainstream segment is not unprecedented. The company has already used a similar approach twice before: first with the Polaris 10/20/30 series, and then with the first generation RDNA chips. Although additional high-end solutions were developed in parallel, such as the RX Vega (2017) and Radeon VII (2019), only the RX Vega was able to achieve some success in the high-end segment. AMD made another attempt to return to the enthusiast segment with the release of the Radeon RX 6900 series and then the RX 7900. Both lines offered competitive price-performance ratios compared to Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 30 and 40 series.

Guin said that AMD’s main task now is to expand its presence in the market. He explained that increasing the share to 40-50% will attract more developers who will optimize their products for AMD technologies. The top manager also emphasized that the company does not strive to become a brand accessible only to Porsche and Ferrari owners, but wants to create gaming systems for millions of users around the world.

Guin assured that AMD will continue to develop advanced technologies and produce high-quality products. However, he noted that the “king of the hill” strategy used back in the days of ATI (which AMD bought in 2006) did not bring significant growth to the company. Now the company’s new approach is to create the best products at the right price, which should ensure its technological leadership in the most popular segments.

When asked about plans to release flagship GPUs, Guin did not rule out the possibility of such products in the future, but emphasized that increasing AMD’s market share remains a priority. Without this, it will be difficult to attract developers to optimize their products for AMD technologies. Guigne noted that declaring an intention to capture only 10% of the market would not arouse enthusiasm among developers. However, a strategy aimed at achieving 40% share generates much more interest and willingness to cooperate. Only after achieving this scale will AMD be able to seriously think about competing in the high-performance segment.

Despite the shift in focus, Guigne did not deprive enthusiasts of hope. He confirmed that AMD continues to work on high-performance solutions using chiplet technology, although he did not give specific dates for their release. Let us recall that AMD has already successfully used chiplet architecture in the current generation of RDNA 3 GPUs, dividing the GPU and cache memory into separate chips. However, the company is also rumored to be working on dividing the computing units into separate chiplets, which poses an extremely difficult engineering challenge for GPUs due to the need to provide ultra-high throughput and minimal latency when exchanging data between chiplets.

The company has already surprised the industry by releasing Ryzen processors with an innovative chiplet design, which has allowed it to strengthen its position in the CPU market. If AMD can replicate this success in the graphics segment, it could have a significant impact on the entire industry. Nvidia, which has long dominated the high-end GPU market, could face a major challenge if AMD’s strategy is successful.