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So what does all this make AMD's decision to pull

Dec. 25, 2018 by Katherine Berry

So what does all this make AMD's decision to pull this off?

Well, AMD had to make the decision to only offer its flagship GPUs at this point in time—the flagship cards in its lineup don't come with the same capacity limitations at 7nm as previous generations of GPUs. But it's pretty clear that AMD has an uphill battle of pushing the boundaries.

"We have a lot of competition with other semiconductor companies for these products in the PC space," AMD CEO Lisa Su says in a recent interview. "We have an important opportunity for AMD to offer products that can be customized to meet the needs of our customers. We have a lot of competition with other semiconductor companies for these products in the PC space."

In this case, it's Nvidia's next big opportunity. With AMD's big-name entry in the PC space, AMD will be able to offer a solid competitor for its next-generation line of low-power, high-performance graphics cards. On the other hand, Nvidia's low-power cards will still be far from the last thing that a company like Nvidia wants.

AMD's decision to pull off that feat also means that even if Nvidia has the market share to support its next-generation offerings, it'll still have to pay to get AMD to deliver more mainstream graphics cards, especially at an entry-level price point and at the same time, on a smaller platform.

"We have the potential for a lot more than just the Radeon VII," Su says. "We have a lot of potential for a lot more. I think this is really important for the development of the next generation of GPUs."

When we asked AMD what would happen if Nvidia pulled off this feat, Su said the company had made a major mistake by pushing its GTX graphics cards to the same level of performance with its own existing cards—and had lost some of its market share. "It's a big deal when you hit where the market is at. Now they're having to make all kinds of sacrifices," she said. "We've changed our approach to making our GPU architecture look great. And that's what matters for us. There will be big compromises that we're making with respect to these products. But we just don't want to make a big deal out of it."

It's possible that AMD has taken advantage of an obvious weakness of Nvidia's GTX graphics cards to pull off, or that it's actually trying to play devil's advocate and try its luck at