AMD is on a roll financially. Team Red reported its highest reported revenue since 2005 at $1.8 billion for Q3 2019. This is an 18 percent quarterly increase. This is huge because AMD’s been in something of a slump since the Phenom days. It’s essentially been treading water for the past 15 years. With the arrival of Ryzen, Epyc, and Navi, things have changed significantly.
What are the reasons for this significant growth in their revenue? They’re exactly what you think they were. Namely, Ryzen and Navi. The 7nm Zen 2 architecture brought AMD the IPC improvements it desperately needed for performance parity with Intel. By offering more cores and more threads at every price-point, AMD’s taken the consumer PC market by storm. European and East Asian markets are seeing AMD capture the majority of the CPU market share for the first time in over a decade.
Meanwhile, the EPYC Rome processors have been doing something similar in the server market. Intel’s Xeon chipsets have had virtual market dominance over the server market for, well, almost forever. AMD had less than 1 percent market share as recently as 2017. EPYC has changed things drastically, with Team Red claiming 10 percent of the market in just 2 years. Accordingly, this has been accompanied by massive increases in EPYC sales: a 50 percent increase this quarter alone.
Year-on-year average selling prices for AMD GPUs have also increased, thanks to Navi leveling the midrange playing field. The increase in revenue has also allowed Team Red to reduce debt, down by over $440 million this year.
Things are looking bright for AMD. We hope the upturn in revenue will be accompanied by greater investment in R&D and even more great product releases.
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