AMD Stock Recovering from January Dive, Rise Attributed to Forthcoming GPUs & SOCs

Anyone who pays attention to computing knows that Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has been struggling for some time. They are in the unfortunate position of being #2 (of two) for CPUs, second to Intel. AMD primarily focuses on the budget-market with APUs and CPUs that outperform Intel’s directly-competing options in that range. In the GPU market, AMD is again #2 (of two) to NVIDIA for discrete GPUs, and this is a vicious and close marketing battle.

AMD has exhibited a steady downward spiral in their stock prices for the past 4 years.

However, they have started to see an uptick this week, due in part to an article published by Barron's that shows a shift in focus which hopefully indicates a more positive trend. The article mentions a few of the more important changes to AMD’s business focus.

The first is a shift away from such a heavy PC desktop element, from 90% of the business to only 60% at the end of 2014. This is seen most noticeably by both Sony and Microsoft using their chips for their gaming consoles, which we touched on previously. The big push towards a non-PC market is seen in the way they are marketing themselves to the enterprise sector:

“AMD technology is found in everything from PCs, workstations, supercomputers and large-scale cloud data centers to airplanes, digital signage, casino games, game consoles, and more. Our technology partners serve markets around the world in every walk of life, from online shopping to social interactions to gaming.” (Source: AMD online marketing materials).

AMD will release a new discrete GPU in Q2-Q3 this year, based strictly on rumors coinciding with AMD CEO Lisa Su's comments at CES (“we have some very good products in the pipeline”). AMD is also focusing more heavily on custom SoC markets where Intel doesn't compete, facing up instead against some of the mobile vendors. These two ventures could steer the company toward the black this year, but their current market positioning is volatile and threatened.

We will be giving a more in-depth look into AMD in the coming weeks and we’ll keep you posted on anything we see, positive or negative. Let us know in the comments below if there is anything specific you want us to look into and we’ll do our best.

- Scott “Abibiliboop” Griffin.