AMD’s latest quarterly earnings showed a resurgent chipmaker with revenues of $2.13 billion, up 49.9 percent from the year before. Net income came in at $170 million, up steeply from $38m just a year ago.
Notably, AMD grew its cash position to $1.5 billion, up from $1.21 billion in the previous quarter, and expects 42 percent revenue growth in the first quarter of this year.
Success in the data center
The report reflects the success of its recent generations of processors both for the PC market, as well as its Epyc server chips and Radeon Instinct GPUs for the data center.
The enterprise, embedded, and semi-custom segment was significantly dragged down, however, by weaker sales of games console chips as the PS4 and Xbox One near the end of their lifecycle.
Despite that, revenue growth for this segment clocked in at seven percent thanks to the success of its data center lineup. This comes after cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud have started to offer Epyc processors as an option on their platforms.
The First Gen (“7001 Series”) Epyc saw AMD gain a foothold in the low single-digits, while new Rome Epyc processors were launched in Q3 of last year. The latter was billed as the world’s “highest performance” x86 processors, with AMD suggesting that enterprises replace two-socket Intel servers with single-socket servers running Rome.
The third-generation “Milan” Epyc processors are on track to be unveiled in the second half of this year.
“We enter 2020 well positioned to continue gaining share across the PC gaming and server markets, based on having an unmatched portfolio of leadership products spanning from desktops to laptops, data centers, and game consoles,” said Lisa Su, AMD’s CEO, during the earnings call (via PCWorld).