AMD: Cryptocurrency played negligible role for GPU sales revenue

In a verbal commentary on AMD’s quarterly earnings for the past few months, CEO Lisa Su said “crypto” was a “negligible” component to graphics revenue.

Su says this in response to an analyst question about what portion of the revenue comes from cryptocurrency. “We don’t think there was a significant crypto component in our graphics revenue,” she says. According to Su, the RDNA 2 architecture is the main driver for growth, also in the field of mobile and data center GPUs.

She expects strong demand for gaming graphics cards to continue. In addition, Su points out that there are still many gamers who are looking for the video cards they want and that AMD wants to ‘support’ that question. She doesn’t give any further details, saying only that the company will continue its efforts to get GPUs into the hands of players.

Lisa Su also said in her response that graphics will not be the biggest growth engine in terms of revenue for the second half of this year. The most important factor will be data centers, in the form of server processors and to a lesser extent GPUs dedicated to them.

The Computing and Graphics segment, which includes Ryzen processors and Radeon graphics cards, posted quarterly revenue of $2.25 billion, up 65 percent from the year-ago quarter and up 7 percent over the year. compared to the first three months of this year.

According to AMD, the significant increase is mainly due to more processor sales. Lisa Su indicates that desktop and laptop revenues have increased by double digits. The company talks about a richer mix of sales of Ryzen CPUs for desktops and laptops, pointing directly to Ryzen 9 processors. The number of deliveries doubled compared to last year. Su also mentions the sharp increase in the most recent mobile Ryzen 5000 processors.

The Enterprise Embedded and Semi-Custom segment had revenues of $1.6 billion. This segment includes console chips for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S and AMD’s EPYC server processors. Turnover is an increase of 183 percent compared to the same period in 2020.

As usual, AMD doesn’t provide exact numbers, but Su does pinpoint a number of factors that contributed to the 183 percent increase. For example, she says that the demand for game consoles is expected to remain high and she points out that revenues will also follow when Valve’s Steam Deck goes on sale in December. This handheld includes an AMD apu. She also mentions the RDNA 2 GPUs for the infotainment systems in the latest Tesla Model S and X models and the strong demand for the second generation of the EPYC server processors.

AMD achieved total revenue of $3.85 billion in the past quarter, according to the quarterly figures. That is an increase of 99 percent compared to the second quarter a year earlier. Net profit grew even faster. That amounted to $ 710 million, while a year earlier it remained at $ 157 million. That is an increase of 352 percent.