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Welcome the new rookie

AMD's Radeon Products Group has got itself a new graphics cards partner (opens in new tab), which might positively impact its market share, as noticed by MegaSizeGPU (opens in new tab). Soonfoals will initially offer mid-range and entry-level graphics cards for channel and retail markets, but the Lightning lineup could eventually broaden to address demanding users.

The Soonfoals Lightning family currently consists of four graphics card models: Radeon RX 6400 with 4GB of memory, Radeon RX 6500 XT with 4GB of GDDR6, Radeon RX 6600 with 8GB onboard, and Radeon RX 6650 XT with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. In addition, the boards utilize the Navi 24 and the Navi 23 graphics processors and feature clock speeds following AMD's reference specifications. As a result, some of these cards are among the best graphics cards available today.

Perhaps the most intriguing part about the Soonfoals brand is that it belongs to Weikeng Group (opens in new tab), one of the five most prominent distributors of distributors in Greater China and the Asia Pacific region. Weikeng business is to resell products from over 50 international suppliers and co-develop products if needed, not exactly create new brands, so the fact that the company decided to do so is already curious.

In a bid to increase its share on the market of standalone desktop market cards, AMD needs to increase the number of partners that ship its Radeon RX boards. There are dozens of companies that carry Nvidia GeForce products, but only about ten add-in-board card makers supply AMD-based products.

Adding an AIB partner to the APAC region is a big deal for AMD if it wants to increase sales of its Radeon RX graphics processing units as there is a large market for entry-level graphics cards there. Another thing to note about this new partnership is that it emerged months after AMD promised to increase GPU supply, so we can speculate that the company has indeed raised GPU orders to TSMC and now has more silicon to sell.

Sales of discrete graphics cards for desktops totaled 13.4 million units in Q1 2022, up 32.2% compared to Q1 2021 and an increase from $13.19 million in the fourth quarter of 2021, according to Jon Peddie Research. AMD's market share was about 24%, a moderate growth, whereas Nvidia continued to dominate the market with an over 75% market share.
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