AMD might be looking forward to another bad quarter as their GPU and CPU market share is expected to fall further in Q1 2016. The report comes from Digitimes who have received information from sources close to the tech industry that a weaker PC market and lower than anticipateddemand for Radeon cards, AMD's market share will hit a new low in the current quarter and is expected to fall until the launch of new and competitive products based on their Zen and Polaris architecture.

AMD CPU and GPU Market Share Might Fall Further in Q1 2016 Due To Weak PC Market and LowDemand For AMD Products

The last few quarters have been pretty harsh to AMD in which they lost a major chunk on their market share to competitors. To put things into perspective, AMD witnessed a loss in revenue of 28% during 2015 compared to 2014, their graphics cards (Radeon 300 and Fury Series), although being competitive against competitors didn't capture any significant market share and their desktop lineup has seen only refreshes based on the older cores (Piledriver). Despite a weaker PC market, both Intel and NVIDIA managed to report revenue growth while AMD reported a major decline in revenue and their market share is expected to fall further as next gen products are going to launch in late Q2/Q3 2016. The exact quotes from Digitimes are provided below:

Demand for standalone graphics cards has already been sluggish given a weak PC market, and the market for standalone graphics cards continues to decline. In the already-shrinking market, AMD's rival Nvidia has eaten away at its market share, the sources indicated.

In the PC processor market, AMD's gap behind Intel has widened. And it remains uncertain whether AMD's next-generation Zen architecture can help the company make a comeback, industry sources noted.

In the standalone GPU segment, AMD will have to ensure that the launch of its Polaris architecture will be on schedule, the sources suggested. Any delays of the launch or performance issues could interrupt its way to recovery, the sources said. via Digitimes

It is clear that for AMD to come back with a bang, they should timely launch their next gen products based on their Zen and Polaris architecture. AMD is expected to deliver Polaris GPUs on schedule however same could not be said for their Zen processors the industry believes might not be able to hit market in Q4 2016.

AMD has previously reported that they will start shipping Zen in late 2016 followed by first full year revenue in 2017. The site mentions that AMD's Bristol Ridge and Summit Ridge families for AM4 platform may not help AMD much in regaining their market share from Intel but will put somewhat pressure on Intel when getting on terms with PC firms, most probably in OEM space.

One of the main reasons we could see why the 300 series, regardless of their competitive pricing didn't turn out to be a success for AMD was due to the late launch of the cards. The Radeon 300 series was launched 9 months after the first Maxwell cards hit the market.

Even though the 300 series mostly reused last gen cores on the 390, 380, 370 and 360 series GPUs, the late launch meant that most of consumers had already made shift to a readily available card in the form of GeForce 900 series. AMD's Fiji based products with HBM not only launched months after the 300 series cards but since start, the R9 Fury X didn't seem to offer greater benefits over the GTX 980 TI which was available at the same price.

AMD has so far showed their muscles in DirectX 12 optimized titles thanks to an Async ready GCN architecture while NVIDIA still works on driver support for the new API. On the DirectX 11 front, the Radeon cards didn't push out as much optimizations at a much needed pace for 2015's AAA titles compared to GeForce cards. We saw a glimpse of the Radeon cards performance with the AOTS benchmark yesterday which shattered the GTX cards but AAA titles with DirectX 12 optimizations are yet to hit the retail and are only available in either BETA or Alpha state at the moment. NVIDIA has on one hand emphasized a lot of their efforts on game ready drivers rather than BETA or Alpha drivers which could be one reason why they still not have drivers out in the market.

Some of the blockbuster titles were bundled with GeForce 900 series cards which made them seem more appealingto consumers such as The Division, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Assassins Creed: Syndicate, Rainbow Six Siege, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Witcher 3, Batman Arkham Knight, Far Cry 4, The Crew, Assassins Creed: Unity and even Fallout 4 as a part of AIB driven promotions. AMD also ran several bundle promos that were run for a limited time and featured Dirt Rally, Star Citizen (On Purchase of entire OEM system), Star Wars: Battlefront and the upcoming Hitman.

Regardless, AMD has to face heat from all corners in 2016, their Polaris GPUs will be facing the Pascal chips which are to be introduced at GTC 2016 and their Zen family is going to tackle both Broadwell-E and Kaby Lake chips from Intel, launching in Q2 2016 and 2H 2016 respectively. For AMD to make a perfect comeback, they will have to time their products right without any delays that may hurt the market growth around the product in long term.

AMD Polaris GPUs in Mid-2016 To Power Next-Gen Radeon 400 Series Graphics

The one family which everyone expects to be a game changer for AMD is Polaris and AMD has placed some really high bets on their next generation, 14nm FinFET based GPU architecture. AMD Polaris GPUs will have two chips, known as Polaris 11 and Polaris 10. In their presentation, AMD has touted Polaris to feature 2.5x performance per watt compared to their 28nm GCN architecture along with a redesigned architecture that focuses on improving their geometry and tessellation performance.

14nm FinFET Technology

Globalfoundries.com

14LPE – Early time-to-market version with area and power benefits for mobility applications

14LPP – Enhanced version with higher performance and lower power; a full platform offering with MPW, IP enablement and wide application coverage

We know this from AMD that Polaris will be arriving in mid of 2016. This places the launch ideally in June 2016. June sees two major events, Computex and E3. Last year, AMD introduced their Radeon 300 series cards at E3 2015 at a conference collaborated by PCGamer. This year could see a similar event as the last one was met with great response. During the same time, NVIDIA is expected to have their own Pascal GTX GeForce launch. Now we know that AMD is using the 400 series naming scheme on an upcoming set of mobility graphics cards but those cards are not Polaris based as they fall in Q2 2016 and not mid-2016 that is the planned availability date set for Polaris GPUs. Still, it is a given that AMD will be using the Radeon 400 series branding for their Polaris GPUs arriving in June.

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Next up, we have the architecture. Polaris incorporates a lot of improvements. There's a reason AMD is getting 2.5x performance per watt out of these chips. The new 14nm FinFET node is one reason, updated architecture and ISA are another. Known as GCN 4.0, Polaris embeds within its core, a primitive discard accelerator, hardware scheduler, instruction pre-fetch, improved shader block and memory compression algorithms. The GPUs also incorporate new display engine capabilities with HDMI 2.0 functionality finally coming to Radeon users and DP 1.3. Multimedia engines are updated with h.265 4K decode and 4K 60 FPS encode.

Another key enabling technology that will be featured on the flagship Polaris chips would be HBM2. The latest standard in the high-bandwidth memory architecture will allow GPUs to feature vast pools of VRAM on a very compact chip that will also consumer lower power than traditionally used GDDR5 chips leading to improved efficiency of the entire chip. AMD already has some really compact solutions based on their high-end GPUs that are available in the market and that tradition would be kept alive with the successor of the Fiji cards. Expect to see the GPUs in action during GDC and Computex 2016. AMD expects to regain a portion of market share in the discrete GPU market from NVIDIA with Polaris GPUs however right now, NVIDIA's market share has gone past 80% according to several reports from within the industry, including Jon Peddie Research.

AMD Polaris GCN 4.0 Block Diagram: