In a verbal commentary on AMD’s quarterly earnings in recent months, CEO Lisa Su said that “crypto” was a “negligible” component of graphics revenue.
Su says this in response to an analyst’s question about what portion of the revenue comes from cryptocurrency. “We don’t think there was a significant crypto component to our graphics revenue,” she says. According to Su, the RDNA 2 architecture is the main driver of growth, also in 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 demand. She gave no 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 reply 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, had quarterly revenue of $2.25 billion, up 65 percent from the year-ago quarter and up 7 percent from compared to the first three months of this year.
According to AMD, this 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 thereof doubled compared to last year. Su also mentions the sharp rise of the most recent mobile Ryzen 5000 processors.
The Enterprise Embedded and Semi-Custom segment achieved revenues of $1.6 billion. Among other things, the console chips for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S and AMD’s EPYC server processors fall into this segment. Turnover is an increase of 183 percent compared to the same period in 2020.
As usual, AMD does not give exact numbers, but Su does point out 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 already points out that income will also follow when Valve’s Steam Deck goes on sale in December. This handheld contains 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 last 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. It amounted to $ 710 million, while it was still stuck at $ 157 million a year earlier. That is an increase of 352 percent.