Hardware specialist AMD has said that cryptocurrency mining is not a core driver of its GPU business.

The firm released a statement on its website responding to a note written by analyst Christopher Roland from Wall Street Susquehanna that ended up being picked up by CNBC.

This said that AMD was facing increased competition in the cryptocurrency mining space with Bitmain producing its own ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) for mining Enthereum. This, Roland claimed, was going to put a dent in AMD and Nvidia's graphics card business.

The firm released a statement responding to what was written.

"Yesterday a report was published on AMD which hypothesized very high revenue for Ethereum-related GPU sales," AMD said. 

"As a reminder, on our Q4’17 earnings conference call we stated that the percentage of annual revenue related to Blockchain was approximately mid-single digit percentage in 2017. We had significant growth in the GPU business outside of Blockchain in Q4’17 as we ramped our Radeon Vega products, our GPU compute products, and our Apple business. We also spoke about strength across the rest of our business with AMD Ryzen and AMD EPYC product momentum. We have very compelling long-term drivers for the company including PCs, servers and graphics and our Q1 2018 financial guidance reflects that.

"We appreciate the time and attention that investors continue to pay to Blockchain and cryptocurrency, but would also like to keep it in perspective with the multiple other growth opportunities ahead for AMD."

The boom in cryptocurrency mining has resulted in an increased price threshold and demand for graphics cards. In 2017 alone, cryptocurrency miners spent $776m buying three million GPUs, with sales of AMD cards rising eight per cent year-on-year. 

While Nvidia has not commented on this most recent story about GPUs and cryptocurrency mining, the firm's chief Jensen Huang has said that the market is not even close to meeting the demand that's out there right now.