AMD has published its business figures for the first quarter of 2021. Compared to the same quarter of the previous year, sales rose from $1.786 billion to $3.445 billion, a new record.
Sales rose by a whopping 93 percent year-on-year but only increased by six percent compared to the likewise strong fourth quarter of 2020.
AMD boss Lisa Su justifies the extremely positive business result, among other things, with the “best product portfolio in our history “, which was successfully brought to men and women in times of “robust market demand“.
“Our business continued to accelerate in the first quarter, driven by the best product portfolio in our history, strong execution, and robust market demand,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. “We had outstanding year-over-year revenue growth across all of our businesses, and data center revenue more than doubled. Our increased full-year guidance highlights the strong growth we expect across our business based on increasing adoption of our high-performance computing products and expanding customer relationships.”
The CPU/GPU division increased sales from $1.438 billion to $2.100 billion and achieved an operating profit of $485 million instead of $262 million — which is still seven percent more sales than at the end of 2020.
AMD speaks of higher sales at Ryzen and Radeon as well as higher average sales prices. In addition, there was now a new record for sales of notebook processors for the sixth consecutive quarter.
In the server and semi-custom segment, sales literally exploded. It rose from $348 million to $1.345 billion on a profit of $277 million instead of a loss of $26 million. According to AMD, this is due to the drastically increased sales of chips for the Playstation 5 and the Xbox Series X/S, and the Epyc 7003 alias Milan also recorded significant growth.
In addition, AMD was able to continue paying off the debt in the first quarter of 2021; instead of $488 million, it is only $313 million.
For the second quarter of 2021, AMD expects sales of $3.6 billion, which would be another record. According to boss Lisa Su, among other things, the Radeon RX 6000 Mobile is on the plan, i.e., Navi-2x graphics chips with RDNA2 technology for laptops.
