Home / Tech News / Featured Announcement / AMD aims to start increasing GPU production, but problems persist

AMD aims to start increasing GPU production, but problems persist

Nvidia acknowledged the short supply of graphics cards last week, prompting retailers to step in and prioritise gamers over cryptocurrency miners. Now, AMD has addressed the issue, attempting to solve the problem entirely by ramping up the production of more units.

The root of the short supply of GPUs surrounds the extraordinarily high demand created by cryptocurrency miners who require the high power to create Ethereum and similar online currency. This has caused AMD’s fourth quarter of 2017 to see a year-over-year increase of 34 percent for the company’s revenue, sitting at $1.48 billion, $958 million-worth of which came from AMD’s Computing and Graphics division.

The cryptocurrency market “consuming a lot of GPUs,” says MD CEO and president Dr. Lisa Su. “It’s a good part of our business.” That being said, much of the growth comes from “outside the blockchain market,” as demand is being created in other markets such as gamers.

“The graphics channel is very low, and we’re certainly working to replenish that channel environment,” explains Dr. Su. The availability of graphics cards is “lower than we would like it to be,” and “we are ramping up production.”

Of course, creating more GPUs has been the solution on everyone’s lips for quite some time, but it’s a lot more complicated than it might seem. Not only is demand obscenely high, but it takes months to process orders and a highly intricate procedure to assemble the 16nm/14nm FinFET and AMD itself is facing shortages of both GDDR5 and HBM2 memory.

If those issues aren’t bad enough, there’s a sense of insecurity about ramping up production due to the volatility of the cryptocurrency market. Once there is a big enough dip or an entire crash, used GPUs will flood the second hand market and undercut AMD’s effort to supply its user base with new models. This is exactly what happened to the company last time, as second hand Hawaii (290/390 series) cards destroyed any effort to rebuild the market.

It might be some time before AMD manages to tackle the source of the problem head on, but it is attempting to make GPUs a lot more accessible in the coming months of 2018. In the meantime, some retailers are listening to Nvidia’s advice on taking precautionary measures to prioritise gamers via quantity limits on purchasing new graphics cards among other things.

KitGuru Say: Market stabilisation still seems so far off with regards to graphics cards, but here's hoping that the Red Team can find a way sooner rather than later. Are you currently waiting to purchase a new graphics card? What one do you currently have your eye set on?

Become a Patron!

Check Also

KitGuru is hiring – tech reviewer applications open!

If you've ever wanted to review tech, then this is a perfect opportunity as we are now hiring for a new reviewer to join our team! Prior experience is not strictly necessary, but we would like to see some example works from applicants. 

We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker.

Thank you for visiting KitGuru. Our news and reviews teams work hard to bring you the latest stories and finest, in-depth analysis.

We want to be as informative as possible – and to help our readers make the best buying decisions. The mechanism we use to run our business and pay some of the best journalists in the world, is advertising.

If you want to support KitGuru, then please add www.kitguru.net to your ad blocking whitelist or disable your adblocking software. It really makes a difference and allows us to continue creating the kind of content you really want to read.

It is important you know that we don’t run pop ups, pop unders, audio ads, code tracking ads or anything else that would interfere with the KitGuru experience. Adblockers can actually block some of our free content, such as galleries!