In the battle for domination in the graphics niche, the prominent players are Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD), Micron (NASDAQ:MU) and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA). Investors in AMD stock are betting on a company that’s kept up with the competition through thick and thin, but there’s no room for complacency in the tech war.
With new product releases to get excited about, Advanced Micro Devices stock holders can rest easy knowing that the company is still on the leading edge of the GPU (graphics processing unit) battlefront. But can AMD continue to push the boundaries and add value amid an uber-competitive tech landscape?
Behold … AMD’s Nvidia Killer
The GPU niche has grown considerably in recent years, with leading manufacturers leapfrogging past each other to make the fastest, most powerful devices on the market. To quote Columbia University’s Michalis Polychronakis and co-researchers Giorgos Vasiliadis and Sotiris Ioannidis:
“Driven to a large extent by the ever-growing video game industry, graphics processors have been constantly evolving, increasing both in computational power and in the range of supported operations and functionality.”
Not long ago, it seemed as if the graphics-card battle had been won decisively when AMD came out with the Navi 10 GPU, which is hosted inside the company’s RX 5700 graphics card series. Sporting a streamlined graphics engine, multi-level cache, and all-new compute units, the redoubtable Navi 10 offered the most seamless streaming and most powerful encoding to date.
No wonder they called it the “NVIDIA Killer”: the Navi 10’s release was an event that delighted techies while giving the AMD stock price its nice little bump, at least temporarily. Moreover, the Navi 10 is a mid-tier offering, meaning that it’s competitive not only in terms of raw performance, but also when measured via a performance-versus-price ratio.
As if that weren’t enough to knock out the competition, AMD plans to release its next-generation GPUs, known as the Navi 21 and Navi 23, in mid-2020. As a higher-end product, the Navi 23 in particular will feature improved performance and most likely a higher price point, and is very likely a direct response to Nvidia’s similar RTX 2080 Ti.
Buy AMD Stock to Win the Graphics Race
AMD keeps coming up with the best graphics cards and processors on the market, and a stake in Advanced Micro Devices stock is very likely to benefit from the company’s ambitious vision and nearly flawless execution of that vision. Serious desktop gamers are practically drooling at the newly-released Radeon RX 5500, which is touted on the company’s website as AMD’s most evolved high-performance desktop-gaming GPU:
“Powered by the groundbreaking 7nm RDNA architecture with Radeon Image Sharpening and Radeon Anti-Lagtechnology, Radeon RX 5500 delivers extremely efficient, ultra-responsive, high-fidelity gaming… The Radeon RX 5500 GPU powers high fidelity gaming for immersive explosions, physics, and lighting effects, bringing realism to life.”
If you’re a gamer, that’s probably music to your ears; if you’re an AMD stock investor, hopefully you can at least appreciate the verve and the vividness of that description of the RX 5500. You see, desktop computers might seem old-fashioned in the era of the smartphone, but serious gamers take their desktop computers seriously — and Advanced Micro Devices takes its graphics technology seriously too, in case you couldn’t tell by now.
The Takeaway on Advanced Micro Devices Stock
Whatever the future of gaming technology might bring, Advanced Micro Devices is bound to remain on the cutting edge and AMD stock should, if I’m correct in my assessment, be a solid performer amid a constantly evolving — and seemingly never-ending — war of the GPUs.
As of this writing, David Moadel did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.