Ryzen processors show strong sales, proving to be just the tonic AMD needs

AMD obviously pinned a lot of hopes on Ryzen turning its fortunes around in the processor market, and indeed the new CPUs (introduced in the spring) have been selling strongly, playing a big part in ensuring a healthy financial report in the latest quarter (Q3).

Ryzen and Radeon (the firm’s CPUs and GPUs) drove the computing and graphics group to rake in revenues of $819 million (around £620 million, AU$1.05 billion), not too far off double the sales AMD managed in the same quarter last year ($472 million – that’s around £360 million, AU$610 million).

Chief executive Lisa Su made a bold claim along with the revelation of these figures, namely that Ryzen desktop processors represented around 40 to 50% of sales at some (unspecified) online retailers. In other words, AMD was practically level pegging with Intel – at certain outlets, that is.

And all this was just the tonic AMD needed to help push revenue up an impressive 26% year-on-year, to a total of $1.64 billion (around £1.25 billion, AU$2.1 billion). That was considerably ahead of analyst estimates which had forecasted revenues of around $1.51 billion.

Su noted that: “Strong customer adoption of our new high-performance products drove significant revenue growth and improved financial results from a year ago.”

Miners’ strike

The not-so-good news came with AMD’s forecast for the next quarter, which predicts that revenue will decline by between 12% to 18% (quarter-on-quarter). Part of this equation will be sales for cryptocurrency mining GPUs cooling off.

So that’s not all bad news for some, and certainly gamers who have encountered shortages of graphics cards thanks to miners this year will doubtless be pleased to hear this.

Another point of caution here is that this month saw Intel’s new Coffee Lake desktop CPUs being unleashed, finally bringing six-core models to the mainstream in an effort to hit back at Ryzen’s multi-core advantage.

Obviously enough, we’d expect these new Intel offerings to make a serious impact, and they could well cause some big waves that seriously wobble the good ship Ryzen.

That said, Coffee Lake CPU stock seems to be an issue right now, with processors seemingly thin on the ground (at least in the UK, where the major online retailers are showing November 1 as the ship date for the likes of the Core i7-8700K and i5-8600K).

But for now, it’s ‘Ryzen shine’ time, for sure…

Via: The Register

• Meanwhile Ryzen mobile CPUs could soon be heading to our best laptops

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