AMD announced new PC chips and graphics cards that they claim can deliver better performance than alternatives from Intel and Nvidia.
Chip stocks have done well ahead of the widespread launch of fast 5G networks. The PHLX semiconductor index rose 60% in 2019, outperforming the S&P 500, while AMD grew 148% as analysts predicted that it would take share from competitors. Intel, meanwhile, has been facing supply issues, and in 2019 its stock grew about 28%.
AMD is bringing out a new group of laptop processors that pack cutting-edge tiny transistors measuring 7 nanometers. Intel announced 10-nanometer chips last year and is working to release its first 7-nanometer products in 2021. Meanwhile, AMD also has 7-nanometer server chips that challenge Intel.
The eight-core Ryzen 7 4800U chip will enable up to 90% better multithreaded performance than an Intel Core i7-1065 G7 chip, AMD said in a statement, citing its own tests.
Laptops containing the new Ryzen 4000-series chips, as well as new Athlon 3000-series chips, will come out from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo starting this quarter, AMD said.
Later on Monday Intel showed off its next chip for laptops, known by the code name Tiger Lake. The chip's launch is "extending our leadership in mobile even further in high-performance, by double digits, and we're not talking 10 percent,"Â Gregory Bryant, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's Client Computing Group, said at a company event held at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Intel intends to give the chips to device makers this summer.Â
AMD also has new 7-nanometer Radeon RX graphics processing units. The Radeon RX 5600 XT, boasting up to 7.19 teraflops of power, can offer better performance than Nvidia's GTX 1660Ti, AMD said. That card will be available starting on January 21. Nvidia declined to comment. Intel, for its part, said that a standalone graphics card that uses the code name DG1 was working inside a laptop running at its event.
AMD's notebook unit market share in could jump from 15% in September 2019 to 18% to 20% by the end of 2020, Instinet analysts David Wong and Abigail Eberts wrote in a note distributed to clients on Thursday.
"We expect AMD to continue gaining share in data center, desktop, and notebook processors and begin showing clear share gains in discrete GPUs through 2020," they wrote.
In October Microsoft announced 15-inch versions of the Surface Laptop 3 that contain AMD Ryzen chips.
