AMD plays the Radeon division on a card: AMD Navi triumphs or Radeon may disappear

The future of the AMD Radeon division is played to a card, the AMD Navi could be the return of the company to high-end gaming or fall into the abyss

Much is being said about the AMD Navi architecture based on the 7nm lithography developed by TSMC. It is normal for this to happen, since the Vega architecture has been an unprecedented failure due to performance, lower than that promoted by AMD, its price absurdly something due to using HBM2 memories to improve performance somewhat and its consumption, a total nonsense. The lack of stock due to the difficulty of HBM2 memories and the lack of custom models have led these charts to be a failure in all rebla.

AMD is clear that Vega is not a gaming architecture, it is an architecture that is fine, without more, for the professional segment and that is where they will focus Vega 20, focusing their efforts on Navi for the gaming market. 

Playing with fire, AMD's specialty

Ryzen has been a success for the company, but it has been an unprecedented risk. They bet everything on Zen architecture, the basis of the AMD Ryzen as a solution and direct competition against the Intel Core. The thing has gone so well that EPYC and the Threadripper developed independently by the engineers, have sold well, even better than expected. The stars have even wanted Intel to have serious problems with 10nm and to top it off, production saturation, because the demand for 14nm processors exceeds the production capacity of its plants. The perfect storm for AMD.

The company is currently in trouble with NVIDIA, a monster like Intel, but it has an advantage: NVIDIA does not produce its GPUs, third parties do, specifically it is TSMC.

This is where the game comes in. NVIDIA can develop powerful solutions based on the lithographs that TSMC has available, but AMD is in the same situation, so if a lithograph is not available in time, the two companies have the same problem.

NVIDIA for its part has the advantage of having plenty of money to develop whatever it wants and bring it to market as soon as it wants: Raytracing and DLSS. AMD does not have the capacity at this time to compete with these two technologies, something that they have already made very clear on several occasions, ensuring that they will not implement Raytracing until it is easily moved by an entry-level graphics (between 2 and 5 years) So it's up to AMD Navi to be able to move 4K @ 60FPS games if it wants to compete with NVIDIA directly.

The game is that if AMD Navi does not deliver on its promise, the problems can be significant. Lisa Su, CEO of AMD has promised that this architecture will be able to compete with the high-end of NVIDIA, come on, that it will compete head to head with the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti. On paper it is great and right now, with the data we have (almost none) it is difficult to give a sentence, but it is clear that the company is risking life or death, because if they are not competitive they could have a very bad time when Intel gaming graphics arrive, which will surely cause NVIDIA to increase its demand to continue to be the leading company in the graphics card market.

Navi is therefore a bit of the all or nothing of the Radeon division as we know it today. Hopefully it goes well and in the future we can talk about three companies that offer gaming graphics instead of the current two and all three compete in the high, medium and low range, which will be positive for our pockets.