In Case You Were Wondering, No, AMD Hasn't Managed To Fsck Everything Up. It's Still Making Lots Of Money

AMD beat Wall Street's expectations for the first quarter of this year as demand for gaming PCs, notebooks, and servers using its x86-64 processors remained high during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Our business continued to accelerate in the first quarter driven by the best product portfolio in our history, strong execution, and robust market demand,” CEO Lisa Su told financial analysts on the chip designer's Q1 2021 earnings conference call on Tuesday. “We had outstanding year-over-year revenue growth across all of our businesses, and data center revenue more than doubled."

Amid the ongoing semiconductor supply shortage, AMD this year launched its Ryzen 5000G APUs and Milan, its third-generation Epyc server processor family for high-performance computing. As for its graphics cards, its most recent Radeon RX 6000 line is still going strong.

Su said AMD's latest gear is going into all sort of machines from laptops built by Lenovo and Asus, to upcoming AI-friendly supercomputers in America and Europe.

Here’s a quick rundown on the most important numbers from AMD's Q1 earnings report [PDF].

• Revenues totaled $3.45bn, an increase of 93 per cent compared to the $1.77bn in Q1 2020.
• Net income was $555m, up 243 per cent from the $162m this time last year.
• Gross margin percentage was 46 per cent, no change there year-over-year.
• GAAP earnings per share were $0.45, a jump of 221 per cent from the $0.14 from a year ago.
• Computing and graphics is the biggest segment for the company, bringing in $2.1bn in revenues, up from 46 per cent from a year ago. Average selling prices for client compute and graphics cards were up, year on year, due to the desktop and notebook mix of PC sales, and the availability of high-end Radeon parts.
• Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom for data centers and video games consoles, mainly, totaled $1.3bn, up 286 per cent from the previous year. This segment was helped not just by organizations snapping up Epyc parts for remote services, but also demand for AMD's components in refreshed consoles.

Although semiconductor supplies are tricky at the moment, Su said AMD haven't been impacted too much, and will remain on schedule to fulfill its roadmap. She expects AMD to continue gaining momentum throughout the year as available stock increases.

Rome is AMD's most profitable Epyc processor at the moment. In the coming quarters, Milan is expected to take over as top cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, announce instances powered by the microprocessor family. AMD's Xilinx acquisition is due to close at the end of the year, too. ®