AMD posts quarterly profit from console socs and joint venture – update

AMD has written black numbers in the second quarter of 2016: the company made a profit of $69 million. The results are attributable to deliveries of semi-custom socs for the Xbox and PlayStation and to income from a joint venture.

Quarterly sales from semi-custom socs rose 59 percent from last quarter, the largest growth since AMD began shipping these chips in 2013. Sales grew 5 percent from the same quarter last year. AMD expects shipments to peak in the third quarter as Sony and Microsoft gear up for the year-end period when most consoles are traditionally sold.

AMD CEO Lisa Su announced that AMD’s semi-custom socs will be arriving in three more new systems, including the Xbox Scorpio next year. She didn’t say which ones the others are, but chip production on one system will start next quarter. It may be Nintendo’s NX. The new design wins should generate a turnover of $1.5 billion over the next three years.

Further contributing to AMD’s earnings were revenues from the Thatic joint venture. AMD licenses its technology for x86 processors and system-on-a-chips to this company from AMD itself and a collection of Chinese companies. Thatic provided $150 million in additional revenue.

Revenue from the Computing & Graphics division fell by 5 percent due to a decline in deliveries of desktop processors. According to Su, deliveries of GPUs in the first half of 2016 would have increased by ‘double digits’ compared to last year. Furthermore, the introduction of the RX 480 is said to have led to the largest shipments of video cards to sales channels since the fourth quarter of 2014, although this does not say anything about final sales.

Su further promised not to forget the high-end market with the arrival of the Zen apus and the Vega GPU architecture. Commenting on the quarterly results, she expected Zen chips for desktops to become widely available in the first quarter of 2017, with possible limited availability by the end of 2016. She also promised Zen laptop chips with integrated graphics. . The first Zen chips for servers should appear in the first half of 2017.

AMD’s quarterly profit was $69 million on sales of just over $1 billion. AMD also suffered a quarterly loss of $40 million, according to the non-GAAP figures, which some say provide a more representative picture of a company’s performance. Certain taxes and depreciation, for example, are included in the non-GAAP figures.

Update, 13.50: Added additional information about Zen availability and changed the first Zen chips to not become the ones for servers.