News is circulating around AMD’s recent stock price surge with the company enjoying its best market performance for some time with a price jump of around 10% accompanied by several favorable ratings from broker houses. Canaccord Genuity upgraded its rating on AMD stock to 'buy', with some analysts even going as far as predicting a return to profitability for the company. Are we looking at a genuine revival for the world’s only real competitor to Intel and Nvidia?

AMD announced the arrival of their new Polaris-based GPUs at Computex a few weeks ago, with the key message that their new RX 480 card would a) be highly suited to VR applications and b) retail for a very aggressive $199. The company in fact talked about Polaris GPUs essentially democratizing VR, offering a VR capable chip to the masses at a price point that meant we could all have a taste, regardless of budget.

Then we also have very positive indications that their next generation Zen CPUs will put AMD back in the game when it comes to pure processor performance. In fact we looked at the new Excavator-architecture and found it be a very positive indicator of where AMD are headed, offering wholly improved IPC compared to previous generations.

Of course, AMD has so far not revealed any solid figures for Polaris or Zen, but the company is certainly making the right noises. AMD CEO Lisa Su recently spoke to CNBC:

“… it is about our products. We are a tech company and we have been working very hard building great products for high-performance computing and graphics and we think that will give us the opportunity to grow profitably over the next couple of years. Virtual Reality is one of those great applications that just changes the way that you deal with immersive applications and devices and it’s not just in gaming, it’s really across a number of different segments. AMD provides the graphics processors for that we can actually change the game. We actually really believe that as we get the performance levels to the right place we can get the one hundred million VR users, and that’s our goal.”

I’m pretty sure most overclockers would gladly welcome a revived and fighting fit AMD that could challenge and compete with Intel and Nvidia. You can read about the AMD stock price rise here on WCCFTech.com plus the full interview with CEO Lisa Su on CNBC.com here.