Gadgetory

even if you won't let anything colored green or blue come within 10 feet of your PC it's hard to deny that the last few years have been a tough time for AMD fans aside from very minor incremental updates we haven't seen any truly new high-end desktop CPUs and team red is still getting handily beaten in the GPU market as well but hope springs eternal and it looks like there's going to be plenty for AMD fans to get excited about in 2017 but is it enough to make AMD competitive to make them more of a mainstay among PC gamers and perhaps most importantly to make them more of that sweet paper that will allow them to continue to innovate in the future to answer let's first take a closer look at what AMD is up to on the GPU side of things today we've seen their focus shift from trying to compete directly against Nvidia at every segment of the market to competing on value for the money their new RX 480 priced at two hundred US dollars was heavily marketed as affordable VR at a lower price point than Nvidia was willing to offer this resulted in AMD shipping one and a half million more discrete desktop GPUs in the third quarter of 2016 than they did in the same period in 2015 nearly a 70 percent increase but can AMD continue this momentum right now there's nothing current-gen on the high end from AMD but that's set to change very soon with Vega its next iteration of its North Star themed GPUs which AMD has already confirmed will be aimed at the high end and enthusiast segments while they won't be able to undercut Nvidia on price by very much seeing as they essentially contract with the same third-party fabs to actually manufacture the chips offering performance similar to a gtx 1070 or a 1080 at a slightly lower price could help AMD a great deal especially as it doesn't actually cost the company as much more as you might think to make a higher tier GPU than a mid-range or a low tier one which should improve their profitability although Vega GPUs will be using the same GCN fourth generation architecture as the RX 480 they'll be beefed up with nearly twice as many stream processors which could make the GPU Wars very interesting come the first half of next year but what will the AMD fan pair his or her shiny new Vega GPU with well AMD's new Xen CPU line-up will be released soon marking a dramatic shift in AMD CPU philosophy as well you see part of the reason AMD lost so much ground in the CPU market over the last five years is that they focused more on core count meaning that you could buy a six or an eight core AMD chip for fairly cheap but performance per core has lagged behind Intel often significantly with high power consumption being yet another cross to bear and since single threaded performance is typically more important for gamers and even in multi-threaded workloads past a certain number of cores as we discovered recently AMD chips have been a harder sell especially considering that the AMD desktop platform at least their high-end FX chipsets haven't been updated in so long that they lack native support for USB 3 ddr4 PCI Express 3.0 and nvme SSDs and that's ignoring Intel specific standards that are gaining traction like Thunderbolt 3 most of that though changes with Zen as AMD has publicly announced that the focus is squarely on per core performance along with lower power consumption and early reports seem to indicate that Zen might be pretty close to intel's Broadwell family performance wise and while Broadwell is a couple of generations old at this point keep mind they didn't tell single-threaded improvements from Broadwell to the current generation kb lake have been quite minimal as the focus for Intel has been more on improving the platform overall including graphics performance so the vast majority of users might be hard-pressed to notice too much of a difference between a read computer and a blue one so with that in mind AMD pricing the chips correctly could mean users might choose Zen instead of paying the Intel tax for a performance boost they might not notice or Intel exclusive technologies like Thunderbolt but of course AMD isn't just a mainstay in desktop PCs how are things looking for their laptop and console endeavors well the good news for AMD is that not only did their sales of laptop GPUs grow in 2016 but AMD GPUs were also included in all 15-inch models of the new Apple MacBook Pro which is flying off the shelves for some reason of course a small kick in the teeth is that AMD is no longer the only player in the console graphics market with Nintendo switching from a custom AMD chip to an Nvidia SOC for its new switch hybrid console back to the original question though why am D has some obvious hurdles to clear 2017 looks like it's going to be a very exciting year if you're all about hash tag better read just don't get all political if you have to call Amazon support when your shipment is late if you're not a member of Dollar Shave Club yet join today and you'll get your first month of 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