AMD’s bumper profits are being driven by Ryzen’s success

AMD Ryzen Threadripper

There’s more good news for AMD with the firm’s latest financial results (for Q1 2018) showing that its processors are continuing to sell at an impressive pace – as has been indicated elsewhere this week – with the Computing and Graphics division almost doubling its revenue year-on-year.

Computing and Graphics means processors and graphics cards (primarily Ryzen and Radeon), and that arm of the business raked in $1.12 billion (around £800 million, AU$1.48 billion), which was up 95% compared to the same quarter last year (when net revenue was $573 million – around £410 million, AU$760 million).

In a conference call, CEO Lisa Su said that: “We believe 2018 is shaping up to be an excellent year for AMD Ryzen, Radeon, and Epyc [server CPU] products.”

Seasonally stronger

Su also singled out CPU sales with the observation that they were “significantly better than seasonality”, so in other words, stronger than sales normally would be at this time of the year. She also made it clear that Ryzen products comprised of the majority of AMD’s processor sales – 60% of them in fact.

That certainly fits in with what we heard yesterday, regarding Ryzen processors racking up some impressive sales according to one German retailer’s statistics, which highlighted the Ryzen 5 1600 chip as doing particularly well.

The CPU and GPU cash coming into the coffers was the primary driver for AMD to reach an overall revenue total of $1.65 billion (around £1.2 billion, AU$2.2 billion) in Q1, which was up 40% year-on-year. That’s some impressive growth indeed.

AMD’s chief executive also touched on Ryzen mobile chips, with a big push this current quarter expected to bring many more laptops running with these processors to market.

AMD reckons that over 25 new notebooks with Ryzen mobile CPUs will ship as the year progresses. Pushing forward on the laptop front is going to strengthen the Ryzen brand further, obviously enough.

We saw the HP Envy x360, the first notebook to run with one of these chips – the Ryzen 5 2500U to be precise – emerge in the UK last November.

Via PC World

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).