After yesterday’s release of the “new” Radeon RX 560 XT GPU, AMD has discarded a few handheld statements from Lisa Su that mean several things when we read between the lines. AMD currently holds about 20% of the current GPU market, a very low value considering the benefits of nodes.
AMD’s options are currently in the middle range, which is undisputed. Its Radeon VII has not affected buyers so much that the limited stock it had when it was released is sufficient to supply those who eventually decided to buy such a card.
In addition, the performance is between an RTX 2070 and a GTX 1080 Ti, although in some cases the latter is also the case. In other words, to have the technological advantage of a much more advanced node, performance is not as expected.
From a global point of view, it’s necessary to put a blow at the table that reverses roles and improves the AMD landscape. This coup must come from the middle segment of GPUs, because in the upper segment nothing with new architecture will come onto the market until next year.
According to Lisa Su, AMD isn’t in a hurry to push the output of Navi, i.e. it indirectly tells us that its latest architecture is ready right now, but why not launch it? As a good company, AMD must look out for its partners if it wants them to earn a return on their investment in its products.
So AMD is giving time for the current stock of GPUs to normalize, which Su says will happen sometime in the second quarter.
Meanwhile, according to AMD’s CEO, the stock of first quarter graphics cards is still high, so he has to leave a temporary space so that wholesalers and retailers don’t have to “swallow” the existing stock of Polaris GPUs.
The truth is that this leads Navi to lag behind the data we talked about yesterday, late July or early August, giving the inventories time to reduce their number and allow greater acceptance by all.
In any case, AMD will have to compete with the full range of NVIDIA cards, especially the 16 series and to a lesser extent the RTX 2060, but what can we expect from Navi?
Without disclosing a lot of data at the moment, not an official one, the first thing we can expect is a significant increase in performance when we have our eyes on the Polaris 30.
Navi will arrive in a 7nm node of smaller size and predictable with GDDR6, allowing both parties a significant increase in frequency compared to the current range.
The most obvious question is whether they will be able to stand their ground in the single combat or whether they will be able to exceed NVIDIA’s range. At the moment we do not know, but what is clear is that Lisa Su is not in a hurry to enter into this dispute until the middle of summer.