AMD President and CEO, Lisa Su, has announced that cryptocurrency mining is not part of their long-term strategy for growth despite the high demand for graphic cards by digital currency miners.
However, she claimed that the company’s state of affairs could change in the near future depending on how things will turn out.
"Relative to cryptocurrency, we have seen some elevated demand. But it's important to say we didn't have cryptocurrency in our forecast, and we're not looking at it as a long-term growth driver. But we'll certainly continue to watch the developments around the Blockchain technologies as they go forward."
Revenue increase
Based on its latest financial results, AMD registered a revenue of $1.22 bln in the last quarter, a 19 percent increase from its revenue in the second quarter of 2016. The high revenue increase is driven by surging sales in the company’s computing and graphics segment.
Demand
Digital currency mining is an energy-intensive process that requires high-capacity GPUs to facilitate the procedure. In mining, new transactions are added to a Blockchain. For adding new blocks, miners are given new tokens in return.
The profits from the transactions are taken from the difference between the energy used in the process and the prevailing exchange rate of the digital currencies being mined.
Ethereum miners are the major users or buyers of GPUs for their mining activities. Due to the surging increase in Ethereum price, miners are adding more processing power to their computers to bolster their output.
Bitcoin miners, meanwhile, use special-purpose computers in their mining operations.