Amid a global shortage of semiconductors affecting everything from cars to graphics cards, Team Red isn't prioritizing cryptominers over gamers in terms of who gets to buy the company's newest Big Navi graphics card, AMD Chief Financial Officer Devinder Kumar said at a recent technology conference.
"We do not prioritize our product or make them for the crypto folks," Kumar spelled out during the Deutsche Bank Technology Conference 2021. What’s driven the growth, he explained, was the high-end Radeon 6000 Series -- and indeed, the graphics giant had a massive year.
"We started the year with a 37% increase in revenue," Kumar said during a Deutsche Bank Technology Conference, describing the fantastic year AMD had financially. "And really, it was early in the year, we wanted to make sure from a supply standpoint, in particular, that we could be confident in terms of everything we need from wafers to substrates and also to the ATMP capacity. We increased that to 50% and then 50% to 60%."
"I would say that the demand for the products was strong and actually has gotten stronger," Kumar added.
The figures weren't broken down specifically by product category; instead AMD's Ryzen CPUs and Radeon RX graphics cards were both lumped under the Compute and Graphics segment, according to ExtremeTech. That segment saw substantial gains thanks to sales of both processors and graphics cards, with the latter being much harder to find at retail for a variety of factors.
Analysis: AMD's crypto windfall can't be ignored forever
That AMD has to specifically address the crypto question is really a problem of the company's own making.
AMD hasn't exactly been forthright regarding its stance on cryptominers buying up all its cards to put to work in the cryptomines. Nvidia is much more open about its desire to see its cards get into more gamers hands than AMD has, even to the point of publicly exploring how much of its graphics card revenue is tied up in cryptomining.
Meanwhile, AMD doesn't seem to want anyone to notice that their cards are popular choices for cryptominers and that they appear to be out of stock just about everywhere for everyone else.
There's only so long you can go without a forceful public statement on the matter before gamers are going to start paying attention, even among the more devoted AMD fan base, and wonder which side AMD is on.
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