Why Is AMD Stock Soaring Today?

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) were up more than 6% in early afternoon trading Tuesday. The surge, which follows a nearly two-week slump to end 2017, comes on the back of new details related the chipmaker’s collaboration with Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) .

According to a potentially accidental post on Intel India’s website, Intel’s highly-anticipated upcoming CPU with AMD Radeon graphics, the Intel Core i7-8809G, will feature AMD’s high-end graphics cores, as opposed to the lower grade “Polaris” GPU.

The news that the i7-8809G will pack a serious punch is encouraging for both Intel and AMD. Customers these days need top-of-the-line hardware to power e-sports games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at competitive framerates, and it looks like Intel’s chip will be a legitimate option for serious gamers.

Meanwhile, AMD was forced to respond to concerned gamers after an update to its Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition left some titles unplayable. The update was intended to fix a few of the program’s kinks, but instead, the driver caused critical errors on some older DirectX 9-based games, including Witcher and Command & Conquer.

AMD nearly caused an uproar when an employee’s post on a company forum seemed to imply that the affected games were not important enough to be fixed.

“This title [Command & Conquer] is from 2007, so we are unlikely to devote any valuable engineering resources to this issue, which is most likely caused by outdated API modules,” wrote AMD support engineer “Ray_M.”

But the company was able to restore confidence after AMD Software chief Terry Makedon confirmed that the bug will be patched.

“I am seeing some stories pop up about AMD not supporting some old games. That is absolutely not true, we are identifying the bug and working on a fix asap. C&C, Witcher, BfME, etc will be working again,” Makedon tweeted.

After closing at $10.28 per share last week, AMD marched more than 6.8% higher to touch an intraday high of $10.98 early Tuesday afternoon. The two aforementioned headlines are likely not the primary catalyst for today’s gains, but they do underscore the chipmaker’s strong start to 2018.

AMD is also benefitting from a rebound in tech stocks following a month of volatility throughout the sector. Tech stocks dominated Wall Street throughout 2017, but profit taking and portfolio rebalancing caused a noticeable pullback in some of the year’s hottest stocks throughout December.

Nevertheless, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite gained more than 1.3% during the first trading period of the New Year.

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