We are once again in a transitional period for PC enthusiasts, mainly PC gamers with the newest generations of GPU partially announced (Intel and Nvidia side specifically), but this new one DEFINITELY will not be known as the mana for Crypto miners and scalpers.
Judging by Intel and AMD respective earning reports, I jumped to that conclusion.
While the PC market is not growing as the worst of the pandemic is already behind us, the consensus of Intel and AMD earning reports are that PC is going to slow again and that GPU in particular will be mostly gamers looking from them, as it ALWAYS was supposed to be.
Intel on their front, managed to beat estimates and be profitable again after many missed opportunities including failing to abandon in an efficient way the 12 nm manufacturing for its processor compared to AMD’s already tamed 7nm and going to do the same for 5nm and the closure of many businesses.
Intel plans for a restructuring during its Q4 2022 and sadly, this means layoff in redundant areas or no-progress areas.
Meanwhile AMD, AMD earned $66 million in profits in Q3 on around $5.6 billion in revenue and this means that they are in negative in comparison with last year, which the company attributed to “the softening PC market and substantial inventory reduction actions across the PC supply chain”, coinciding with the Crypto Winter in his peak and Ethereum blockchain going proof-of-stake, rendering many GPU-runned crypto mining unusable if ETH as the cryptocurrency was the only one that guaranteed return (while there are some other cryptos that still have proof-of-work, but not profitable).
Regarding gaming specifically, the business rised 14% but not thanks to Radeon, but semiconductors sales and this is the area where Playstation 5 and Xbox Series S/X fall, which definitely PC gaming is no longer a big winner since crypto mining went down.
AMD is scheduled a keynote on November 3rd that has a big probability that will showcase RDNA 3 and how the 5nm manufacturing of the graphic processor can do against the Lovelace Architecture of RTX Geforce 4000 series by Nvidia.