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AMD-Opteron-A1100

AMD released its results for both the 4th quarter of 2022 and the unabridged year yesterday evening — and gave a brief hint virtually Zen'southward potential performance. The PC market has taken a beating over the by year, and AMD's results reverberate that — the smaller CPU manufacturer lacks the server and mobile marketplace share that Intel has historically used to buffer itself.

Revenue in the computing and graphics business was $470 million, up 11% from Q3. AMD made significant strides in slashing its operating loss in this segment, it lost $99 one thousand thousand in Q4, down from $181 million in Q3. Enterprise, embedded, and semicustom sales (this includes the Xbox One and PS4) revenue dropped to $488 million, from $637 1000000 in Q3, but this decline is seasonal and expected. Sony and Microsoft make their largest purchases in Q3 equally they ramp up for holiday demand, and and then decline in Q4. Total quarterly acquirement cruel to $958 1000000, from $one.06 billion in Q3.

AMD's revenue for the entire year was $three.991 billion, downwards from $5.506 billion in all of 2022.

AMD-Quarterly

That nautical chart is grim, just there were a few vivid spots in the quarter — and perhaps a few reasons to be more than optimistic about 2022.

Improvements and expectations for 2022:

During the conference call, AMD executives pointed to several areas and upcoming deals that could heave AMD's finances. CEO Lisa Su noted that AMD'south business concern shipments increased 15% in the quarter, and AMD improved its share of the notebook market thanks to Carrizo. These improvements were generally relative to Q3, yet, not the full twelvemonth.

In GPUs, the news was more positive. AMD's ASPs (boilerplate selling toll) increased sequentially and year-on-year, thank you to the new Fury, Fury X, and Radeon Nano products. AMD also launched several loftier-profile workstation wins with Dell, and the first FreeSync-enabled Lenovo laptop (the Y700). The firm believes it gained market share in both consumer and workstation products in Q4 2022.

AMD expects sales next quarter to fall 13% sequentially, as demand for both consoles and PCs is weakest in the first one-half of the twelvemonth. Near-term production improvements are few and far between. Earlier this month, Sunnyvale launched the A10-7890K, a Kaveri-class APU with a 4.3GHz tiptop clock, estimated 4.1GHz base clock, and a 95W TDP. Compared to the A10-7850K that launched two years agone, the A10-7890K has an xi% college base clock and a 7.5% higher Turbo Manner. The upcoming APU platform, Bristol Ridge, should bring Carrizo to the desktop — but top-end performance is unlikely to change much. Low power users and SFF fans should get a nice boost, but everyone else is waiting for Zen.

The back half of the twelvemonth should be more heady. During the conference call, AMD noted that while falling panel prices mean less revenue per panel, expected price cuts this year should likewise drive need northwards, and improve segment acquirement every bit a result. Sunnyvale'south new Polaris GPU architecture volition also launch this summer, which should provide an additional sales boost. AMD thinks VR adoption could give it a pocket-sized sales kick also, which is certainly possible — though the acquirement impact of any surge in enthusiast adoption would however be minor.

AMD-Plans

Finally there's Zen, currently expected in very tardily Q4 / early Q1 2022. AMD has stuck to its guns about an estimated 40% functioning uplift, and noted today that information technology had already signed customers to build systems around the new chip.

As for Zen's performance, Lisa Su stated that the CPU is expected to address an estimated 80% of the server market. There are several ways we could read that argument: eighty% of the server market place by revenue, by usage segment, or past TDP. If we assume that this was a straightforward reference to performance, it suggests AMD expects to compete quite well against the meat of Intel's Xeon line.

Currently, Intel'southward Xeon stack stretches from ultra-low power dense servers (Avoton, Xeon D) to the ultra-high-end Xeon E7v3 family, with upward to 18 cores per CPU. AMD hasn't publicly confirmed Zen'southward core count, but current expectations are that the chip will offer at least eight cores in the enthusiast segment. 16-core server variants are certainly within the realm of possibility.

Su's comments suggest that Zen is aimed at the nearly lucrative cadre of the server market, rather than attempting to take Intel on in every course gene and market place segment simultaneously. If and so, it's a very smart move. AMD will face an uphill boxing to reestablish itself in the datacenter, and attempting to stretch a single CPU pattern to challenge both the low-ability Xeon D and the eighteen-core E7v3 processors would exist biting off more than than the company can chew.