AMD’s CEO Lisa Su was recently appeared on CNBC’s Power Lunch Exclusinve interview segment where she answered questions about bitcoin, blockchain technology, the tax reform bill, and sexual harassment in the workplace.
Of particular interest to PC Perspective readers, Dr. Lisa Su shared several interesting bits of information on cryptocurrency mining and how it is affecting the company’s graphics cards. Surprisingly, she stated that cryptocurrency miners were a "very small percentage" of sales and specifically that they represented a mid-single digit percentage of buyers (~4 to 6 percent). This number is hard to believe for me as I expected it to be significantly higher with the prices of graphics cards continuing to climb well above MSRP (it wasn’t too bad when writing our gift guide and shortly after but just as I was about to commit I looked and prices had shot back up again coinciding with a resurgence in mining popularity with the price of cryptocurrencies rising and improving ROI).
Further, the AMD president and CEO states that the company is interested in this market, but they are mainly waiting to see how businesses and industries adopt blockchain technologies. AMD is “very pleased to participate in blockchain” and believes it is a “very important foundational product”. Dr. Lisa Su did not seem very big on bitcoin specifically, but did seem interested in the underlying blockchain technologies and future cryptocurrencies.
Beyond bitcoin, altcoins, and the GPU mining craze, AMD believes that gaming is and continues to be a tremendous growth market for the company. AMD has reportedly launched 10 new product families and saw sizeable increases in sales on Amazon and Newegg versus last year with processor sales tripling and double digital percentage increases in graphics sales in 2017. AMD also managed to be in two of the three gaming towers in Best Buy for the holiday buying season.
Speaking for AMD Dr. Su also had a few other interesting bits of information to share. The interview is fairly short and worth watching. Thankfully Kyle over at HardOCP managed to record it and you can watch it here. If you aren't able to stream the video, PCGamer has transcribed most of the major statements.
What are your thoughts on the interview? Will we ever see GPU prices return to normal so I can upgrade, and do you agree with AMD’s assessment that miners are such a small percentage of their sales and not as much of an influencer in pricing as we thought (perhaps it’s a supply problem rather than a demand problem, or the comment was only taking their mining-specific cards into account?)?
Single digits of amds overall
Single digits of amds overall sales, single digits of all graphics card sales (including Nvidia) or single digits of only amd graphic card sales? If she’s trying to claim that mining sales are single digits of all graphics cards sales for amd only I feel like her research is wrong or that her and her marketing team chose to lie for some reason.
When you put it into the
When you put it into the grand scheme of things, they sell GPU chips and APUs as well to the likes of Sony and Microsoft, on top of their embedded systems sales and of course the OEM PC market, plus the recent Intel deal.
Statistics are funny, you know?
We don’t want to “know” about
We don’t want to “know” about your “feelings”. We want to know what you can prove? We have no reason to call into question what Lisa said.
Blockchain technology has
Blockchain technology has more uses than just coin mining and many enterprise market BlockChain uses are just now starting up. There is just one thing that Lisa Su needs to emphasize for AMD going forward and that’s AMD’s Epyc/Radeon professionl market return where AMD’s Epyc CPUs along with AMD’s professional Radeon GPU compute/AI products can put AMD’s dependence on only the consumer markets in that past and never to return to category!
AMD’s historical high stock price of $93+ in around 2005 with its Opteron Server business making up most of its revenues on AMD’s just 1/4 of the server market share should be a good indicator of AMD’s Potential. In 2005 AMD had yet to purchase ATI and that CPU market alone gave AMD that around $93+ share price and the market cap to go along with that share price.
So sure AMD has its consumer market revenues but look at what a consumer market depndency has done to AMD over the years since the Opteron high period dsys and AMD needs to reduce its dependency on any consumer only market and that market’s terrable revenue stabiity/revenue Growth potential.
Even Nvidia realizes this as Nvidia transitions over to obtaining more revenues from other than only consumer/gaming markets where there is not much potential for new revenue growth. Nvidia’s stock is soaring not because of its relatively flat revenue growth from its consumer gaming market sales. It’s Nvidia’s professional GPU/AI revenues and automotive/other professional revenues that are driving Nvidia’s share prices higher.
So it’s the Professional and new AI markets that have the greatest potential for high margin CPU and GPU compute/AI sales and revenue growth and markets that are not directly consumer related like the automotive/AI markets, other non fully consumer focused markets.
Lisa Su needs to emphasize AMD’s reenrty into the CPU Server/HPC markets and professional GPU compute/AI markets each time that she in interviewed. And any non consumer related semi-custom embedded markets where there is more room for Revenue Growth in any new non consumer professional market usage of Professional market BlockChain workloads or other related processor markets like medical, display signage, etc.
A dependency on Consumer Markets alone almost killed AMD.
very interesting