According to foreign media reports, Advanced Micro Devices’ new Radeon 6000 series graphics card does not seem to have been hurt by competitor NVIDIA.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Semiconductor Industry Observation” (ID: icbank).
According to foreign media reports, Advanced Micro Devices’ new Radeon 6000 series graphics card does not seem to have been hurt by competitor NVIDIA.
So far, NVIDIA’s stock performance has exceeded the Nasdaq Composite Index and AMD. In fact, at the time of writing, NVIDIA’s stock is up 6%, while AMD’s stock is down more than 19%.
This GPU giant continues to maintain its leading position in graphics processing by spending far more on research and development (R&D) than AMD.
According to statistics, NVIDIA has spent more than $24 billion in research and development in its history. But more financial resources don’t tell everything.
NVIDIA’s R&D budget is more than twice that of AMD
Last year, AMD spent US$1.98 billion on research and development, an increase of 38% in the past two years. However, NVIDIA spent $3.92 billion, an increase of 65% in the past two years.
Nevertheless, AMD’s new gaming chips are still on par with NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series, especially in terms of performance per watt. However, user benchmark tests still show that NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series GPUs beat AMD’s Radeon chips in terms of raw performance (excluding power consumption).
In November, AMD launched a new game card based on the RDNA 2 chip architecture. Scott Herkelman, the company’s vice president, said in a statement that the Radeon 6000 series is AMD’s fastest graphics card in history and represents “for many years Committed to the research and development of introducing the best AMD Radeon graphics card into the game market”.
AMD’s computer and graphics division (including the sales of desktop gaming products) in the first quarter of fiscal 2021 (the first full quarter of the Radeon 6000 series) revenue grew 46% year-on-year.
NVIDIA will not announce its first quarter earnings before May 26, but its Ampere RTX 30 series released in September started a faster start as the company announced its gaming division in its fourth fiscal year The revenue increased by 67%.
The latest report shows that NVIDIA increased its market share in the external board market to 83% in the fourth quarter, while AMD’sIt dropped by 6 percentage points to 17%.
In the past ten years, NVIDIA’s R&D expenditure has surpassed that of AMD, and this gap has continued to widen in the past few years. Nevertheless, AMD still admits that NVIDIA’s competitive advantage is not only in financial resources.
2.2 million developers use NVIDIA’s CUDA software
AMD ranks second in market share on x86 processors. Intel is its main competitor in the CPU market, and AMD has been gaining market share in this market in recent years.
AMD also lags behind NVIDIA in providing GPUs in data centers. Last year, NVIDIA received $6.7 billion in revenue from the sales of data center chips, accounting for about two-thirds of AMD’s entire business. The data center segment is expected to surpass games and eventually become NVIDIA’s largest segment.
AMD revealed in its annual report NVIDIA’s main advantages in this market: “In the data center, our main competitor is NVIDIA, because the adoption of its proprietary CUDA software platform establishes its advantages in high-performance computing and Market share in the field of machine learning.”
NVIDIA launched CUDA in 2006, which coincided with the period when NVIDIA began to lead AMD in market share. CUDA opens the door for NVIDIA to apply GPU technology to the growing demand for high-performance computing, including self-driving cars and other AI-related applications.
NVIDIA has a huge network of more than 2.2 million developers using CUDA worldwide. Since NVIDIA already has a broad professional customer base using its software and hardware, it has played a big role in promoting NVIDIA when launching new chip products. In terms of gaming, NVIDIA claims that it has installed 140 million GeForce gaming GPUs.
NVIDIA is continuing to advance
The close relationship between NVIDIA and global developers and gamers can explain why NVIDIA continues to lead AMD in the GPU market.
The latter said: “The increasing complexity of graphics processors and the associated R&D costs represent a huge and growing barrier to entering this market.” With the ever-expanding R&D supportLeading advantage, for now, this advantage for NVIDIA is far better than AMD’s advantage.
NVIDIA continues to invest in the future. It recently announced its first data center CPU (Grace), which is scheduled to be available in 2023. It also now offers a cryptocurrency mining processor (CMP) to take advantage of the growing demand for alternative currencies.
The ability to adapt to new market trends and launch new products reflects NVIDIA’s strong financial strength and why it should continue to grow.