AMD Seeks to Ramp Up GPU Production, but Warns of Memory Shortages

Over the past few weeks, we’ve written several pieces related to the surge in demand(and price) of GPUs. This surge has largely been driven by a boom of interest in cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin has gotten to the point where it benefits from specialized hardware, but many digital currencies can be mined used a gaming-oriented GPU. This has led to many gamers being priced out of the market as retailers raise prices in order to make up for the increase in demand. However, GPU manufacturers are starting to take note and AMD is looking to ramp up production of its GPUs.

According to a recent investor call, AMD is starting to ramp up production of its GPUs in order to meet the increased demand. They noted that they aren’t currently being limited by silicone, but, instead, are facing problems with memory rather that be high bandwidth memory or GDDR5.

While the recent surge has affected both AMD and Nvidia, AMD is in a bit of a weaker position for a couple of reasons. The first is the simple fact that it is a smaller company than Nvidia and is thus less able to scale up production to meet increased demand.

The second issue is the simple fact that AMD’s GPUs are better at mining cryptocurrencies than Nvidia’s are. This is largely due to the fact that AMD offers more FLOPs and more bandwidth for lower prices. This, combined with some structural differences, means that their cards are likely to be more affected by the surge of interest in cryptocurrencies than are Nvidia’s.

Rather or not AMD is able to fully meet the increased demand or how long this cryptocurrency boom will last, remains to be seen. However, it is comforting to know that the company is trying to address the issue even if it is limited by memory shortages.