[ad_1]
Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) made waves earlier this month when it introduced its latest line of graphics cards, the RX 6000 series. After trying and failing to effectively compete with the rival NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) For years in the high-end part of the graphics card market, AMD’s own benchmarks suggest that the company has finally found success with its trio of RX 6000 cards.
In some cases, the performance of AMD cards makes NVIDIA’s pricing seem like a joke. AMD’s $ 699 RX 6800 XT, for example, beats NVIDIA’s new $ 1,499 RTX 3090 under the right conditions. Now NVIDIA is rumored to be preparing a new $ 999 graphics card, the RTX 3080 Ti, to better compete against AMD.
There’s an important caveat in AMD benchmarks: The company is using a technology called Smart Access Memory, which AMD claims provides up to 11% additional performance. The feature is only available on systems with an AMD Ryzen 5000 processor, an RX 6000 graphics card, and an AMD 500 series motherboard.
What this means is that the performance of AMD’s new graphics cards will likely fall short of the company’s benchmarks on systems that don’t meet those requirements. For owners of IntelSystem-based, AMD’s RX 6000 graphics cards may not be the clear winner.
Image source: AMD.
NVIDIA seeks to erase AMD’s advantage
AMD hasn’t gone into much detail about how its Smart Access Memory works, but NVIDIA seems to think it’s no big deal. The company recently said in a statement that it is working on a similar feature for its latest line of Ampere graphics cards, which it plans to enable soon. NVIDIA believes that AMD’s smart access memory uses a feature that is already available on most modern motherboards.
NVIDIA’s version of this memory bandwidth boost feature will work with AMD and Intel processors, and will not require a high-end motherboard. The company said it has achieved similar performance gains using the feature in early tests compared to what AMD has claimed.
If NVIDIA is correct about how AMD’s intelligent access memory feature works, there should be no reason why AMD can’t make it work on non-AMD platforms as well. Either way, it appears that AMD’s performance advantage over NVIDIA will diminish and possibly be completely erased, once NVIDIA enables this feature.
One thing that is not clear: if enabling this feature on NVIDIA graphics cards is just a matter of software update, why wasn’t it enabled all the time? NVIDIA waiting for AMD to promote this feature before enabling it could hurt the company’s brand loyalty.
Regardless of how this all turns out, AMD has produced high-end graphics cards that are capable of competing with NVIDIA’s flagship cards for the first time in years. That’s an achievement and it should allow AMD to gain some of the high-end market.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that AMD shares are automatically a good investment. Shares of AMD have soared this year and the company is now valued at around $ 100 billion, or more than 11 times annual sales and more than 100 times earnings. AMD is a semiconductor company, not a software company, so it’s hard to justify those proportions regardless of optimism around new products.
Whether AMD’s stock is a good investment or not, it is clear that AMD, the company, is going full blast. AMD has caught up with Intel in the CPU market and NVIDIA in the GPU market. If you had suggested this would happen five years ago, you would have been laughed at from the room. Nobody laughs at AMD now.
[ad_2]
