By Nelson Schneider - 11/08/26 at 03:31 PM CT
Advanced Micro-Devices, a.k.a., AMD, has been one of the major competitors in the consumer electronics space for quite some time, initially bursting into the scene with their Athlon processors just when Intel was making a mistake with their Pentium III line. Since then, AMD has typically ridden in second place in the CPU market, behind Intel, only in the last decade pulling ahead after Intel shot itself in both feet with a variety of major hardware exploits that set-back its processors’ ability to do out-of-order processing by quite a bit.
AMD wasn’t content to just suck Intel’s CPU exhaust, though, and in 2006 purchased the third-rate graphics card company, ATI, in order to give themselves a GPU product line. Of course, these Radeon graphics chips likewise couldn’t compete with the big dawg – in this case nVidia – and, in a case of history repeating itself, AMD ended up sucking exhaust in a second hardware market.
However, in possessing the know-how to create both of the major components in any competent gaming or workstation PC, AMD uniquely positioned itself to provide complete CPU/GPU stacks, which they took to calling “APUs.” And who needs a single provider to build cheap, top-to-bottom computer systems that can be treated as a commodity? Console makers, of course! Thus in spite of being widely considered the bargain-bin, store-brand hardware provider amongst PC gamers, among recent consoles, AMD makes the guts for most of them. Both the last two PlayStation and Xbox consoles have been powered by AMD, with only Nintendo choosing to go with nVidia for the Switch and Switch 2 due to their focus on handheld ARM hardware and nVidia being, essentially, the only game in town.
Well, it seems like all of that is in the past, as just this week AMD’s CEO announced that the company was now a “Data Center First” manufacturer who will be jumping onto the AI bubble just as it seems poised to pop. (AMD never did ANYTHING in a timely manner, after all.)
Due to chip shortages caused by massive data center build-outs, the number of privately-owned PCs being built has dropped precipitously in the last year, with AMD experiencing a catastrophic 40% drop in gaming component revenue. Instead of taking the opportunity to fill the niche left behind by nVidia and the various RAM manufacturers – which would have left them essentially uncontested in the gaming space – AMD has decided that data center build-outs sucking up all of the nVidia chips and RAM simply wasn’t enough, and that they will start throwing all of their AMD/Radeon chips into that ravenous void as well.
This is genuinely a missed opportunity to establish themselves as a pro-gamer, pro-tinkerer business. If AMD had decided to release a new line of Radeon GPUs that, while not as good as nVidia’s newest RTX chips, would actually be, you know, AVAILABLE and reasonably-priced, they could have cornered the gaming market altogether, capturing PC gamers with the only products available to buy at MSRP while also capturing console gamers by powering the next (misbegotten) generations of PlayStation and Xbox. Alas, instead of forging their own path and attempting to capitalize on an underserved market, AMD is simply doing to what everyone else does, only a few years too late to actually capture any value from such mimicry.
