AMD’s cloud revenue doubles as it gears up for EPYC 4
First to market with DDR5, PCIe 5.0, and Compute Express Link 1.1
AMD’s revenue from sales to cloud providers more than doubled year-on-year, the semiconductor company said – with 70 new AMD instances launched by Azure, AWS, Baidu, Tencent and others in just 12 weeks.
The news was revealed on AMD’s Q3 earnings call late Tuesday (November 1) – which beat analysts expectations as AMD projected full-year revenues of $23.5 billion, up approximately 43% annually.
AMD plans to launch its latest line of “Genoa” EPYC CPUs next week. The EPYC 4 chips will make it the first to bring a chip with DDR5, PCIe 5.0, and Compute Express Link 1.1 standards to market for data centre customers.
See also: AWS throws SSDs, FPGAs, Nitro chips at Redshift with “AQUA”
AMD Chair and CEO Dr Lisa Su told analysts: "[We began] initial shipments of Genoa to our strategic customers in the third quarter. That is continuing in the fourth quarter. So we are ramping production in the fourth quarter. A lot of the first instances are being qualified here in the fourth quarter into the first quarter.
"What we have said before is that, Milan [EPYC 3] and Genoa are going to actually coexist for quite some time, just given how competitive both are. Genoa is a new platform. It is new DDR5 and PCIe 5.0, and that takes a bit longer for people to qualify. So we would expect both to continue to ramp in 2023."
AMD's Q3: Sales to OEMs slump on match set issues
Revenue from sales to server companies (OEMs) was down sequentially as “server OEMs continued working through match set [component] issues” amid ongoing supply chain issues exacerbated by China’s strict Covid policies.
"Third quarter results came in below our expectations due to the softening PC market and substantial inventory reduction actions across the PC supply chain," said Dr Su.
"Despite the challenging macro environment, we grew revenue 29% year-over-year driven by increased sales of our data center, embedded and game console products."
AMD closed its $50 billion acquisition of FPGA specialist Xilinx earlier this year. That’s now part of AMD’s embedded business. AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su told analysts on the earnings call that the segment had been “performing just extremely well” adding that the company had been industry vertical-focussed.
She said: “We have been very focused on what’s happening within the various sub-segments. I think the nice part of the business is that it’s very broad- based. So we have seen Communications was up for us, Aerospace and Defense very strong, Automotive was also up for us here in the third quarter. We did see some weaknesses: Consumer was weak, there were some sub-segments of Industrial [that were weak].
She added: “We are still supply-constrained in certain nodes and some of the legacy nodes. We have made a lot of progress on supply. So we are seeing additional supply come in in Q4…”
