Indians Prefer Buying APUs Over CPU And GPU: AMD India

AMD is one of the major CPU and GPU makers of the world. The company has a wide portfolio of solutions to fulfill entry-level to top-tier computing requirements. We recently had a chance to interact with Mr. Srinivas M Reddy, Country Head - Channel Sales & Distribution, AMD India regarding the PC gaming landscape in India.

Mr. Srinivas shared some interesting insights about the Indian DIY PC market, the gaming community, and what we can expect from future AMD products. According to the responses from him, Indians prefer to buy an APU over a CPU and a GPU for multiple reasons. This story has a lot more interesting insights on the Indian PC gaming community from AMD.

1. How do you see the current PC Gaming landscape evolving?

India has one of the youngest populations in the world, and that translates to one of the youngest gaming populations as well. Lockdown and home restrictions over the last year and a half have elevated how we use technology to live, work, play, and communicate and the surge in gaming is no exception.

Gaming is central to AMD's innovation & growth story, and the India region is a significant part of this journey. We have already seen gaming laptops and DIY PC demand increase in 2020 due to the pandemic and this trend has continued in 2021 with gaming serving as an incredible medium for people to stay connected and entertained.

We are seeing that increasingly, gamers are demanding more performance from their hardware, with more frames, more pixels, and more immersive experiences expected by users. With new gaming hardware and upgrades available for the PC, both pre-built and OEM, not to forget other platforms such as consoles, the gaming industry is on a strong growth trajectory.

AMD is one of the industry's leading gaming solutions providers delivering CPU and GPU architectures across these platforms to help enable and empower PC gaming in 2021 and beyond.

2. What are the key factors driving the interest in DIY PC gaming? Could you share some insights on the demographics driving this trend in India?

Through a survey that AMD conducted last year, we found that almost every household in India has a gamer of some type. The interest in the DIY PC segment is contributed significantly to by teenagers and young adults.

This is a discerning segment that not only buy various PC components online but also often teach themselves how to build PCs by watching YouTube tutorials and reading various blogs. Whether it be AAA gaming or esports, gamers typically demand the best technology for their enjoyment or in some cases as a competitive advantage in esports.

In addition to traditional gamers, many media professionals, as well as content creators who began working from home have a requirement for high-end hardware. These individuals are more likely between the ages of 25 to 40 years old and tend to buy their products online and have their components delivered to their doorstep.

While the majority of the DIY market is dominated by gamers wanting mid-to-high-end graphic cards, there is an entry-level segment dominated by Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).

In India, we have seen consumers move to prefer buying an APU over a discrete CPU or GPU for cost, power, or form factor reasons. APUs, whilst considered entry level for users' basic graphics requirements actually do offer users a good gaming experience thanks to AMD's innovation and graphics heritage.

In the DIY market overall, the high-end category is dominated by gamers. AMD's goal is to provide a range of compelling products to our end-users who want to build a scalable system that allows them to enjoy incredible power and performance within their budgetary or usage requirements.

3. What is AMD's value proposition for DIY enthusiasts?

We have strengthened our offering in the DIY segment of the gaming market in India with AMD continuing to be the only company delivering both leading-edge CPUs and GPUs, with our award-winning Ryzen 5000 Series CPUs and Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs providing compelling solutions for DIY enthusiasts.

The Ryzen 5000 Series CPUs introduced the latest "Zen 3" architecture for great single, multithreaded, and gaming performance and combine well with our latest Radeon RX 6000 GPUs powered by AMD RDNA^TM 2 architecture. Both are manufactured on our efficient industry-leading 7nm process technology and have been a huge success, and the demand for these series remain strong since their launch.

In recent months, we have announced new products to cater to the gamer and content creator segments. This includes the AMD Ryzen 5000G Series Desktop APUs which bring the power of "Zen 3" and integrated Radeon graphics performance together in a single chip.

In addition to these, individually we do bring to the ecosystem features beyond just the hardware with exclusive features adding to the performance, capabilities, and experiences they deliver. As an example, we have AMD Smart Access Memory technology, offering performance contributions with the right AMD processor and graphics card combination.

Recently we also unveiled AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), a cutting-edge spatial upscaling technology designed to boost framerates to deliver a high-quality, high-resolution gaming experience.
Considering the demand for high-performance and incredibly powerful technology needed to fuel this industry, AMD is constantly looking for ways to introduce features and capabilities that improve the competitive gaming experience.

Gamers have appreciated AMD's offerings in the segment, and we will continue to push the envelope for gamers and creators with top-to-bottom product stack and technologies.

4. What are the opportunities AMD anticipates in the coming year?

At AMD, we are constantly innovating and in a competitive landscape - this is both necessary and expected by our partners and customers. With the launch of "Zen 3" and AMD RDNA 2 architectures last year, we continued to deliver leading-edge compute performance across platforms.

We anticipate that the appetite for computing capabilities will continue to grow and next-generation architectures already in development will continue to have a very exciting roadmap.

We also are committed to the best manufacturing technology and plan to deliver next-generation products on even more advanced process nodes to continue achieving higher levels of performance and efficiency. We are also constantly adding new features designed to give our gaming customers the best experience.

Over the longer term, we see significant opportunities for our high-performance computing and graphics technology to address the most interesting technological applications in multiple areas, including gaming. This, however, requires more compute and better visual capabilities, and no one is better positioned to lead these developments in the PC Gaming segment than AMD.

This is evidenced in our holistic approach to advancing the gaming experience, with top-to-bottom Ryzen and Radeon product stacks paired with advanced technologies such as AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution.

AMD's success is built on delivering a consistent cadence of leadership products. With that, I would like to wrap up by assuring our valued DIY PC Gamers and enthusiasts that at AMD, we are constantly increasing our R&D investments and aggressively driving our roadmaps to continue setting the pace of innovation for the industry.