Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) may be losing more ground in the stock market, as well as the graphics processing unit (GPU) market, after the cryptocurrency mining craze slows down, lowering the demand for their Radeon GPUs.
Earlier in the year and late last year, AMD had seen much success in the stock market with its rapidly increasing market shares, thanks to its cryptocurrency capable Radeon RX 480/470 and RX 580/570 GPUs. The supply of the said video cards were even exhausted due to mass purchases, resulting in a price inflation. Now, though, Morgan Stanley investment bank predicts that with the decrease of cryptocurrency mining, AMD will likely experience a downward trend.
"We believe that AMD's graphics surge has been caused by a sharp increase in sales of graphics chips to cryptocurrency miners. We expect this to meaningfully decelerate next year," says Joseph Moore, an analyst at Morgan Stanley. This may be good news for gamers looking for AMD GPUs who had difficulty acquiring one before due to scarcity or absurd pricing. More Radeon video cards may now become available for the average consumer.
However, the effect on AMD will be otherwise, as the chipmaker company has just experienced the worst performance on Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 on Monday, Oct. 30. This poor performance was the result of a downgrade of its stock by Morgan Stanley in order to "underweight."
Meanwhile, AMD's competitor on the GPU front, NVIDIA, may be poised to seize the spot. The latter has even stated that cryptocurrency mining will not completely disappear, only drop. With this in mind, Morgan Stanley may simply be expecting NVIDIA to dethrone AMD later in the year or in the next for cryptocurrency-capable GPUs.
NVIDIA's mid-range video card GTX 1060, while not as good as the AMD mid-range counterpart for Ethereum cryptocurrency mining, is still a good contender and has also seen a shortage in supply, as well as inflated prices in some areas.
NVIDIA may be planning something big not only for the gaming capability of its GPUs but also for its mining capacity. Regardless, 2018 will be a rough year for AMD on the GPU market.
