If you’re expecting AMD to bring some competition to NVIDIA’s virtually uncontested enthusiast GPU market in the near future, we have bad news for you: Team Red will not be focusing on beating Team Green on the high-end. Instead, the chipmaker will take a different approach instead, aiming to take the market share from its arch-rival on the mainstream segment.
AMD’s SVP: Market Share Is The Focus
In an interview with Tom’s Hardware, Jack Huynh (AMD’s SVP & GM of Computing and Graphics Business Group) revealed that the company is “looking for scale” – essentially, increasing the market share to the point where developers are more incentivized to design games and applications around its architecture. To do that, he proposes addressing the “80%” of the TAM (total addressable market), and in his words, “I don’t want AMD to be the company that only people who can afford Porsches and Ferraris can buy.”
Of course, part of the deal with NVIDIA releasing immensely powerful GPUs has to do with a marketing strategy called “halo effect”. Ask yourself, when you see the RTX 4090’s performance, do you subconsciously think that its lower-end counterparts will also be powerful against its rivals? If the answer is ‘yes’, that’s halo effect at work, and it helps drive the sales of mainstream products simply by the power of perception.
In the past, AMD has tried to fight against NVIDIA head on to be the king of the GPU hill, but recent attempts has proved somewhat ineffective, especially against Team Green’s hugely successful marketing of its RTX and DLSS technologies. Huynh agrees, pointing out Radeon’s former ATI self has tried such tactics before, but it didn’t make much dent towards the status quo. Hence, going for a large market share by value – a strategy that he stressed on – will be the key to breaking NVIDIA’s longstanding GPU market dominance.
That being said, Huynh further assured that his team will not be giving up on the gaming segment, despite the hype around AI and a shift in priorities among many PC hardware companies. “Don’t worry. We will have a great strategy for the enthusiasts on the PC side, but we just haven’t disclosed it. We’ll be using chiplets, which doesn’t impact what I want to do on scale, but it still takes care of enthusiasts. […] Don’t worry, we won’t forget the Threadrippers and the Ryzen 9’s,” Tom’s Hardware was told.
Pokdepinion: I wish AMD good luck – breaking NVIDIA’s dominance today is harder than ever thanks to its tight grip over upscaling technologies and developer support.
