Without starting a flame war, i personally think AMD is lagging way behind NVIDIA, which lately has been releasing incredible products. They have been expanding in both the gaming market as well as gained a strong foothold in emerging B2B markets such as the automotive industry and virtual reality.
Sure both AMD and NVIDIA will keep growing but now they really feel overpriced.
The upcoming Polaris is supposed to be using HBM2 which should give it a boost.
In the gaming market, AMD have completely lost the high-end and are barely managing to keep a foothold in the mid-range. The RX480 is just barely competitive with the GTX 1060 in gaming, performing worse in DX11 and edging a marginal (~5%) lead in DX12 and Vulkan. The R9 Fury has been all but abandoned by card partners, because it's barely faster the GTX 1060 or the RX 480 while costing 50% more.
None of that really matters, because AMD are absolutely nowhere in the GPGPU market. The market for consumer video cards doesn't have much room to grow, but there's exponential growth potential for GPGPU compute in server and embedded applications. Nvidia are selling rackloads of premium-priced cards to data centers and increasing quantities of chips to the automotive industry. They're in a virtuous circle of economies of scale, with the video and GPGPU markets supporting each other.
AMD have gained some market share in terms of unit volume, but they're in deep trouble when it comes to margins. Nvidia can afford a price war in the mid-range, because they've got a monopoly on the high-end. Nvidia could do to Radeon what Intel did to Opteron.
I like AMD. I particularly like AMD's support for open standards (Freesync, Vulkan etc), but I think that this is a desperation move. Polaris has been a massive disappointment, at least in comparison with Pascal. Unless Zen turns out to be spectacular, AMD are in deep trouble.
Or am I missing something?
Most likely outcome: Zen is decent but not enough to make a dent in intel. At most it pushes Intel's prices down a little.
ARM is the real competitor to Intel not AMD.
With news of the windows x64 emulator for aarch64, 2017 should be a very interesting year on the x86 arm battle for sure.
Might be worthwhile picking up qualcomm shares or stock in some other companies that license from ARM.
