AMD lifted by 50 percent revenue surge

More wins for data centre chipmakers

AMD posted strong quarterly earnings last week, with the chipmaker netting $2.13 billion in revenue, a 49.9 percent increase from the previous year.

Wall Street’s eyes were on AMD following rival Intel’s solid quarterly earnings, helped by its buoyant data centre division.

AMD’s main data centre offerings are its Epyc server chips and Radeon Instinct GPUs. While they remain popular choices, Intel gear enjoys a far larger share in the data centre.

However, AMD’s new data centre offerings helped drag the company’s ‘enterprise, embedded and semi-custom’ segment out of the dirt. Despite poor games console chips sales, the chipmaker was lifted by seven percent revenue growth in the segment, thanks to a significant uptick in Epyc processor sales.

Like Intel, AMD has benefited from the heavy investment in hyperscale facilities made by the major cloud providers, many of which are warming to the company’s data centre kit.

Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure all offer Epyc processors as a service on their platforms. AWS and Azure are using the 2nd-Gen Epyc chips to power new high-performance computing instances. Meanwhile, the chips power the Expanse system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the latest extension of France’s GENCI Joliot-Curie supercomputer, and the Atomic Weapons Establishment Shasta supercomputer.

“2019 marked a significant milestone in our multi-year journey as we successfully launched and ramped the strongest product portfolio in our 50-year history,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. “We delivered significant margin expansion and increased profitability as we gained market share with our Ryzen and EPYC processors. Our focused execution and the investments we made in our high-performance computing roadmaps position us well for continued growth in 2020 and beyond.”

AMD officially launched its Rome Epyc processors in Q3 of last year, two years after the launch of the first-generation 7001 series. The company is expected to unveil the third-generation Milan chips in Q3 2020.