AMD Rides Ryzen To EPYC Quarterly Earnings, The Best In 7 Years
AMD is flying high on its best quarterly earnings in seven years, bolstered by a 53 percent year-over-year jump in revenue to $1.76 billion in the second quarter of 2018, the company announced just a short while ago. Riding its resurgence from Ryzen and Epyc, AMD posted a profit of $116 million for the quarter. That's a $158 million difference from the $42 million loss the company posted in the same quarter a year ago, and a $35 million sequential jump.
"We had an outstanding second quarter with strong revenue growth, margin expansion and our highest quarterly net income in seven years," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "Most importantly, we believe our long-term technology bets position us very well for the future. We are confident that with the continued execution of our product roadmaps, we are on an excellent trajectory to drive market share gains and profitable growth."
Indeed, AMD is in a good place with its Zen architecture, which has propelled the company back into relevance in the high-end consumer and server processor markets. Whereas AMD was once relegated to primarily existing in the budget category, it now has competitive offerings at every price point and performance tier, to go up against rival Intel.
AMD said revenue from its Computing and Graphics segment reached $1.09 billion, up 64 percent year-over-year, on "strong sales of Radeon products and continued growth of Ryzen products." That said, AMD did see a 3 percent quarterly decline in the same segment, due to waning demand from the blockchain (cryptocurrency) market.
The dip in crypto sales had minimal impact overall, however, and was offset by GPU sales for the datacenter. AMD also noted a 37 percent jump in Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom segment revenue to $670 million, and attributed the gain to its outstanding results as a whole.
Investors took note of AMD's performance and sent the stock up by as much as 7 percent in after hours trading. Depending on what is revealed during AMD's upcoming earnings call, the company could see another surge before trading resumes in the morning.
More good times could be ahead for AMD as well. The company just recently introduced its second-generation Ryzen lineup, also known as Zen+, and has already completed the design for its next-generation Zen 2 products. And in the more immediate future, it will unveil second-generation Threadripper CPUs.
What remains to be seen is how AMD will rebound in the GPU space after losing Raja Koduri, its former Radeon Technologies Group boss, to Intel. Koduri went on a sabbatical after AMD launched its Vega products, but instead of coming back to AMD, he joined Intel to lead its own efforts to break into the discrete GPU space.
AMD is still expected to follow up its Vega line with Navi. It's also been rumored that Sony's PlayStation 5 will feature AMD's 7nm Navi GPUs when it arrives in 2020, or sooner.
