Advanced Micro Devices Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) Ahead of RX 480 Launch
tags: NVDA,AMD
After a lot of early guesswork and speculation, Advanced Micro Devices Inc (NASDAQ:AMD) is finally launching its brand new Polaris architecture in retail tomorrow. The board carrying the new technology is the Radeon RX 480. What does that mean for AMD within the foreseeable future?
The company’s new product is going in direct competition with NVidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA)’s recently launched GTX 1070. A logical question is, what is the market for those two new competing products? One hardware consumer demographic that never changes are gamers, but there is a new group forming – that of people who want to experience virtual reality without necessarily playing the new Battlefield game.
This is a group of people who would love to get all the thrills of smoothly performing virtual reality at home without forking additional cash for the extra 0.7 teraflop of compute performance. AMD is very likely to capture just that segment, with its very appetizing VR-ready price tag. The RX 480 has a base model with 4GB of video memory that starts at a delicious $199. While the GTX 1070 does have more horsepower under its hood, it also has a price tag of $379, which is quite a jump.
AMD is also likely to have its RX 480 powering the upcoming Project Scorpio Xbox variant announced for 2017. While the “most powerful GPU ever in a console” has not been specifically named, the performance information provided by Microsoft at E3 hints that the Scorpio will run a slightly clocked-down version of the 480 GP U. Then there’s also the upcoming PS4 “Neo” that will have to somehow compete with the newly revealed Xbox and will likely also have AMD hardware under its hood.
Despite a recent pullback, AMD is doing well on the charts. The stock went from just over two dollars per share in early 2016 to recent highs of $5.50. AMD was hitting overbought levels around that time and the pullback was more or less expected, even without the global tremors caused by UK’s Brexit vote. Net loss for Q1 was down both QoQ and YoY and the company reported a $7 million IP licensing deal in China.
Yesterday AMD ended up 3% down at $4.72 per share.
