The Financial Analyst Day 2020 hosted by AMD at their headquarters in Sunnyvale grabs attention even amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic crisis. This is something you should pay attention to if you are pursuing a finance analyst course. Hosted every year, this event is known for its contribution to explain and educate finance analysts as well as investors about the innovations in technologies and the growth strategies for businesses that help achieve their targets. The event also does a recap of the company’s financial growth over the year, explains strategies, sets targets for the upcoming year, and predicts which of the new technologies would help the company to accomplish the targets. This year’s event started with a session by Lisa Su. She did a quick recap of the company's business performance, followed by an insightful session on the company’s goals and expectations for the coming 3 years.
Plans for Big Technology Investments
AMD is considering technology as the foundation for their business in the coming years. Zen 3 is the next-generation CPU aimed to touch the market in the last leap of 2020. Zen 3 is designed with a 7nm process. The next version, Zen 4 has a 5nm process. However, just having this processor is not the only reason for the CPU’s performance. Better packaging design and interconnection also worked in favour to enhance the performance. The company is planning to scale up its technological investments to procure "X3D" packaging that has a unique combination of chiplets, hybrid 2.5D and 3D die stacking and is expected to deliver an increase in bandwidth density by ten times.
Another important announcement was on the next-generation AMD RDNA 2 architecture designed with a specific focus on gaming. The current AMD RDNA design is available in the AMD Radeon™ RX 5000 series GPUs. The advanced architecture is expected to bring a 50% performance improvement on the basis of “per-watt”. A new architecture for AMD Compute DNA (CDNA) graphics has been announced for the Data Centre to accelerate computing workloads. It is optimized for high-performance applications and machine learning.
Update on PC & Gaming Market
The company’s growth strategy for PC's and gaming segments are impressive. AMD boasts about 100% growth in market share and client unit shipments since 2017. The unique feature of Ryzen product line was that it has 7nm processors in the desktop, mobile markets, and high-end desktop (HEDT). This is to tap the high potential of the gaming market with 2.5 billion gamers across the world using games on mobile phones, PCs, and consoles. AMD's Radeon Graphics IP can address all these markets and offers a choice with a new gaming architecture. Technology giants like Microsoft and Sony are willing to partner with AMD to create next-generation gaming consoles.
Update on Data Centre Market
From 2017, since the first-generation EPYC has been launched, AMD has enjoyed a good reputation in the data centre market. In some cases, the CPUs gave dual socket in a single socket. The second-generation EPYC allows the user a dual socket in a single socket solution.
Conclusion
The best takeaway from AMD’s Financial Analyst Day is the insight and encourage you to get through the company’s long-term strategy. Though there is a good amount of competition, AMD is here to sustain the growth. The company has the right strategy – to attack the growing markets. But they have to face the challenges such as competitions and error-free execution of the strategy. However, AMD has almost cracked it despite the challenges. AMD’s effort to create multi-generations of well-executed products combined with talented sales and marketing team has done a great job indeed.
