AMD Increases Production of Video Cards to Attend Cryptometry Mining

AMD is well aware that its graphics cards are scarce, and the company said it is working on that problem, boosting production.

Both AMD and its main competitor, Nvidia, have dealt with incredibly high GPU demand last year - a demand boosted by customers looking to use graphics cards for crypto-coin mining. AMD launched its new RX Vega GPU series last August, and the two graphics cards in that vein (Vega 56 and Vega 64) have essentially been sold out since then. Even for custom models that use these GPUs, it is very difficult to actually buy today.

Tags: #crypto #mining #amd #nvidia #technology
Author: Cripto.Digital
AMD posted solid results in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2017, with revenue of $ 1.48 billion - an increase of 34% over the previous year. That included $ 958 million contributed by AMD's Computing and Graphics division, which was 60% higher than the same quarter last year. The increase was "driven mainly by strong sales of video cards and Ryzen desktop processors," the company said.

Speaking during an investor meeting to discuss the earnings report, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su said the crypto-coins mining market is "consuming a lot of GPUs." She added, "It's a good part of our business."

Dr. Su also said that much of the growth in sales that AMD saw on its graphics cards came "out of the blockchain market" and acknowledged that the high demand for that segment caused a serious shortfall elsewhere.

"The graphics channel is very low and we are certainly working to restock this sector," said Su. As the availability of graphics cards is "lower than we would like it to be," she added, "we are increasing production." However, Su noted that AMD faces some supply issues: although manufacturing is not restricted by the availability of silicon, the company is struggling with memory shortages GDDR5 and HBM2. (The previous RAM type is used on the RX 400 and RX 500 series cards, while the latter is used on the Vega RX line).

"We continue to work with our partners," said Su.

Nvidia has recently advised some of its resellers to try to limit the amount of video card sales to a single user in order to try to meet the gamers' demand, which it claims to be its main customers. As the demand for video cards is very high, when they arrived at the distributors, people interested in crypto-coins were already in stock, making it difficult for the person who just wanted to buy one for their computer and also make the price increase . Some boards have doubled in price in recent months.