AMD CEO Lisa Su was asked at the recent 20th Credit Suisse Annual Technology, Media & Telecom conference about the keys to growing and expanding their market share in the discrete GPU market.
Credit Suisse's semiconductor analyst John Pitzer asked: "How should we think about your share aspirations with Polaris now ramping, Vega next year? What do you think you can get your share back to within that market?" to which Su replied: "We have made very good progress I would say in the first couple of quarters this year in terms of graphics".
Su continued: "I think it's nice, when you look at graphics it's both in the consumer side on the channel as well as in the OEM business and on the professional graphics market. There's a large opportunity. I think we've gained a good amount of share over the last few quarters, we're going to continue and consistently drive [share growth]. We believe that there's no reason we can't be at 50/50 share overtime, but it will certainly take some time to get there. The key thing is enhancing our relationships with customers, because we believe that it's also important to have a very sticky business going forward."
"[...]I think the market is on-fire", Su added. "It's a great market. Our strategy in GPUs is to play across the entire market. We think we have the IP, the capability, the talent to do that. We started with gaining share in consumer and that's why Polaris is so important for us this year. As we go into more of the higher-end markets with our next generation Vega architecture what you will find is the hardware is very very competitive".
When was the last time AMD held 50% of the dGPU market share? 6 years ago now, back in 2010 - when ATI had beaten NVIDIA to the market with the world's first 40nm GPU, and then followed through with the Radeon HD 5870 graphics card, and the entire HD 5000 series which was great. ATI held 51.1% of the discrete GPU market in Q2 2010.