AMD struggles with declining sales of video card chips due to decline in bitcoin mining

AMD is suffering from the declining interest in bitcoin mining and the company saw the sales of GPUs for high-end cards fall sharply in the past quarter. The good sales of chips for the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One did not prevent a loss for AMD.

AMD’s Graphics and Visual Solutions division achieved sales in the quarter that were 141 percent higher than the same period last year at USD 772 million, converted to EUR 520 million, but that growth is almost entirely attributable to the good sales of AMD. socs for the Sony PS4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One.

The turnover from GPUs decreased both compared to the previous quarter and compared to the quarterly period last year. AMD was able to put away more GPUs from laptop manufacturers, but the supply of GPUs for high-end video cards dropped significantly. “We had already expected that cryptocurrency mining would decline, but the decline was sharp due to the problems at some exchanges,” said AMD CEO Rory Read. AMD expects that the situation will not improve in the current quarter.

AMD also sold fewer desktop processors, but more APUs for laptops. In addition, turnover from chips for so-called ‘dense servers’ for hpc, data centers and cloud computing doubled in the first half of the year. AMD is on track to introduce the Opteron A1100 chip codenamed Seattle in the fourth quarter of this year, according to Read. Seattle is AMD’s first on 64bit arm-soc for servers.

The chip design company is sticking to the goal of getting 40 percent of its revenue from semi-custom chips such as those for game consoles, and the company says agreements with one or two new major customers are on the way. In the end, AMD’s quarterly loss amounted to 36 million dollars, converted to 26.6 million euros, on a turnover of 1.44 billion dollars, or 1 billion euros.