AMD reported third-quarter revenues on Tuesday with a record $13.4 billion, an increase of 45 per cent year on year, as its data centre business nearly doubled and its gaming segment fell sharply, Ars Technica reported.
The data centre segment was up 97 per cent year on year, at a record $8.5 billion. AMD attributes the growth to demand for its EPYC line of enterprise server processors, along with the launch of its Instinct MI450 series GPUs.
Operating margins in the data centre business expanded from 25 per cent to 34 per cent, with operating income surging 168 per cent to $2.88 billion.
The Client business, which includes desktop Ryzen processors, posted $2.95 billion in revenue, up 7 per cent year on year, with growth led by sales of AMD Ryzen mobile chips.
Gaming revenue fell sharply, posting a 40 per cent drop in revenue at $773 million, which AMD attributes to "lower semi-custom and graphics revenue".
The company guided to a stronger fourth quarter. "We expect revenue to be approximately $17 billion, plus or minus 3%. The middle point of our guidance represents approximately 66% year-over-year revenue growth, primarily driven by the acceleration of our Data Center segment," said AMD's chief financial officer, Jean Hu. That projection is up another 27 per cent on this quarter's result.
As reported by Tom's Hardware and relayed by Ars Technica, Intel's fourth-quarter guidance places its revenue estimates between $15 billion and $16 billion. If both companies land where they expect to at the end of the fourth quarter, AMD would exceed Intel's revenue for the first time in history.
That would be a milestone of some weight in an industry where the two names have been paired for four decades.
The word carrying most of the load in all of this is "record", and it is worth being precise about what a record is. It is a total. It is not a statement about any of the parts.
AMD's best quarter contains its sharpest gaming decline in years. Both are true of the same three months, and neither qualifies the other, because the record was never a claim that things were going well. It was a claim about a sum.
Our analysts note how much room that leaves. A company could in principle set an all-time revenue record while every segment but one went to zero, provided the remaining segment grew enough to cover the arithmetic. Nothing in the definition of a record requires any particular business to still exist.
This is a more flexible instrument than it first appears, and the fourth-quarter guidance indicates the direction of travel: approximately $17 billion, around 66 per cent growth, primarily driven by the acceleration of one segment.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has accordingly recommended that the gaming division be congratulated on its contribution to the record, which was $773 million and arrived inside it.