'I don’t want AMD to be the company that only people who can afford Porsches and Ferraris can buy': AMD's Jack Hyunh says being 'King of the Hill' isn't the priority for its next-gen GPUs

When it comes to the top-end of the GPU market, AMD has struggled in recent years against Nvidia's offerings. The RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX are far from bad graphics cards, but put up against the RTX 4080 Super and RTX 4090, it can be a tough sell to recommend the AMD cards against the green team opposition unless the price is right.

In an interview with Tom's Hardware, AMD's senior vice president and general manager of the Computing and Graphics Business group Jack Hyunh seems to think that going for the high-end of the market with the next-generation of AMD GPUs shouldn't be a top priority:

«I’m looking at scale, and AMD is in a different place right now. We have this debate quite a bit at AMD, right? So the question I ask is, the PlayStation 5, do you think that’s hurting us? It’s $499. So, I ask, is it fun to go King of the Hill? Again, I'm looking for scale. Because when we get scale, then I bring developers with us.

»So, my number one priority right now is to build scale, to get us to 40 to 50 percent of the market faster. Do I want to go after 10% of the TAM [Total Addressable Market] or 80%? I’m an 80% kind of guy because I don’t want AMD to be the company that only people who can afford Porsches and Ferraris can buy. We want to build gaming systems for millions of users."

That would tie in with long-standing rumours that AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs were focussing on the mid-range sector, without a halo product to compete with the RTX 4090 (or whatever the RTX 5090 might end up being). 

When asked if AMD was going after the flagship market at all, however, Hyunh did leave the door open for potential ultra-high-end cards in future:

«One day, we may. But my priority right now is to build scale for AMD. Because without scale right now, I can't get the developers. If I tell developers, ‘I’m just going for 10 percent of the market share,’ they just say, ‘Jack, I wish you well, but we have to go with Nvidia.’ So, I have to show them a plan that says, 'Hey, we can get to