Why are gaming GPUs for PCs the one factor AMD simply cannot get proper? That’s the multi-billion-dollar thriller following AMD’s newest earnings name for skilled bean counters (through Seeking Alpha) regardless of a promise that the chip maker’s next-gen RDNA 4 graphics is on monitor for early 2025.
AMD’s Lisa Su, celebrating her tenth anniversary as CEO, defined that the corporate’s revenues have hit a file excessive within the third quarter of this 12 months at $6.8 billion. That was achieved courtesy of wholesome will increase in revenues throughout information centre CPUs and GPUs, plus CPUs for shopper PCs and laptops.
But as soon as once more, Su needed to concede that gaming revenues have been down. In AMD parlance, “gaming” means a mix of graphics playing cards for PCs and customized APUs for video games consoles, most clearly the Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation.
All instructed, AMD stated income for gaming fell absolutely 69% year-on-year to $462 or effectively underneath 10% of AMD’s general revenues. That sounds catastrophic, and it type of is. However, a lot of that’s right down to the inevitable cyclical stoop in console gross sales as the 2 large beasts from Sony and Microsoft proceed to age.
Su pointed to the upcoming PS5 Pro as a trigger for optimism within the close to time period. But as for PC graphics playing cards particularly, sadly AMD would not escape the numbers individually.
Su would solely say that, “income declined year-over-year as we put together for a transition to our next-gen Radeon GPUs based mostly on our RDNA 4 structure. In addition to a robust enhance in gaming efficiency, RDNA 4 delivers considerably larger ray-tracing efficiency and provides new AI capabilities. We are on monitor to launch the primary RDNA 4 GPUs in early 2025.”
The factor is, AMD has been reporting non-specific declines in PC gaming graphics for about so long as we are able to bear in mind now, whereas third-party analysts proceed to report declining market share for the corporate versus the one different important participant out there, Nvidia.
For an organization that appears to be executing so effectively on so many fronts, AMD’s incapability to get PC GPUs proper is a little bit of a thriller. One potential rationalization is that AMD made a giant wager shifting to a chiplet structure that did not repay.
Instead of manufacturing GPUs utilizing a single massive silicon die, AMD determined to separate them into smaller items. That method has paid large dividends for AMD with CPUs. It makes CPUs cheaper and extra simply configurable. But getting chiplets to work with GPUs is a really completely different problem.
AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics, the Radeon RX 6000 collection, was a monolithic design and fairly aggressive throughout all market segments. But RDNA 3, which made that radical transfer to chiplet engineering for the RX 7700, 7800 and 7900 mannequin ranges, has confirmed a lot much less so.
What’s extra, by all accounts AMD has reversed course for RDNA 4, shifting again to an easier monolithic method to GPU design that will not goal the very excessive finish. The implication is that AMD was initially planning to double down on chiplets for RDNA 4, however was compelled to rethink late within the improvement cycle. And that meant it did not have time to engineer a conventional large monolithic GPU.
For now, most rumours suggest that AMD could have one other go at chiplets with RDNA 5. But that actually does stay to be seen. All we all know for positive is that PC graphics is the one blot on AMD’s in any other case close to flawless copybook.
Of course, you might additionally argue that AMD’s consideration has been elsewhere of late, significantly now that the corporate says revenues from AI GPUs for coaching and inferencing have gone from just about zero to matching CPU revenues from servers, the cloud and PCs mixed within the house of only one 12 months.
But the failure of PC graphics remains to be an odd anomaly for a corporation typically experiencing roaring success. At least AMD is not in need of a penny if it needs to repair that. Here’s hoping it does and it’ll.
