AMD makes more sales thanks to chips for the Xbox One S and PlayStation 4 Pro

AMD’s sales are up 23 percent in the past three months from a year ago, mainly thanks to the delivery of the semi-custom socs for the Xbox One S and PlayStation 4 Pro. Good sales of GPUs also contributed to the increase in turnover.

AMD’s Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom businesses posted quarterly revenues of $835 million, up 31 percent from a year ago. In doing so, the business unit further distances itself from the Computing & Graphics division, which includes processors and GPUs; that part turned in $472 million.

AMD was especially able to benefit from the update of the consoles. The manufacturer makes the socs for the PlayStation 4 Slim, the Xbox One S and the PlayStation 4 Pro. In the fourth quarter, those manufacturers will purchase fewer chips, AMD CEO Lisa Su warned, which will cause sales from semi-custom chips to fall.

Turnover from Computing & Graphics was 11 percent higher than last year, mainly due to good sales of GPUs and better deliveries of APUs for laptops. This division is still making a loss, in contrast to the embedded and semi-custom chips branch. The persistently poor sales of desktop processors is partly to blame for this.

The arrival of the Zen-generation processors should improve this. Zen processors for desktops will appear in the first quarter, Lisa Su reaffirmed. Those for the servers will follow in the second quarter. The new GPU generation, codenamed Vega, will also be released in the first half of 2017.

AMD’s total revenue came in at $1.3 billion, 23 percent higher than a year ago. However, the loss rose from $158 million last year to $293 million in the recent period. This was mainly due to a large write-down in connection with a change in the agreement on the purchase of wafers with production partner GlobalFoundries.