Amd closes part of the gap with nvidia due to the popularity of cryptocurrencies

Throughout the fourth quarter of 2017 AMD notably increased its market share in discrete GPUs, and in global shipments of graphics chips, due to the popularity of cryptocurrency mining such as Ethereum.

Cryptocurrency mining makes AMD gain market share

AMD increased its quarterly shipments of graphics chips in the fourth quarter by 8.1% quarter-over-quarter, while Intel's market share decreased by -2% and Nvidia's by -6%.

In the discrete GPU market AMD was the main beneficiary of the 3 million GPUs sold to cryptocurrency miners in the fourth quarter of 2017. Therefore, we can conclude that cryptocurrency mining has contributed greatly, to the fourth quarter revenue of AMD's Computing and Graphics division, these amounted to $ 958 million.

We recommend you read our post about GeForce GTX 1060 3GB is no longer useful to mine Ethereum in Windows 10

AMD's global 33.7% in discrete fourth-quarter GPU shipments is significantly higher than 29.5% in the fourth quarter of 2016 and 27.2% in the third quarter of 2016, due to this increase, Nvidia saw its share decline from 72.8% to 66.3% in the fourth quarter of last year. This turn of events can be explained in part by Nvidia's recommendation in January 2018 for retailers to put players above cryptocurrency miners.

It also helps AMD make Polaris-based graphics cards great for Ethereum mining. AMD is likely to remain the top beneficiary of cryptocurrencies this year because it offers very Ethereum-friendly GPUs and at more affordable prices. It is expected that in the coming months Nvidia will announce new graphics cards based on the Ampere architecture, it remains to be seen if these will be better than AMD solutions for cryptocurrency mining.

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