AMD Crushes Q2 2018 Earnings as Ryzen, Epyc Sales Strengthen

AMD announced excellent second-quarter earnings for 2018 as the company’s overall position continues to strengthen. Overall revenue was $1.76B compared with $1.15B for the same period in 2017, up 1.53x year-on-year. Sales also improved by 7 percent compared with Q1 2018, and gross margin for the quarter was 37 percent, compared with 34 percent in Q2 2017. Net income for the quarter was $116M.

“We had an outstanding second quarter with strong revenue growth, margin expansion and our highest quarterly net income in seven years,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. “Most importantly, we believe our long-term technology bets position us very well for the future. We are confident that with the continued execution of our product roadmaps, we are on an excellent trajectory to drive market share gains and profitable growth.”

Higher revenue for the year on year period was driven by stronger sales across all of AMD’s business segments, while the sequential increase was driven by higher revenue in the Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom segment. Overall GPU revenue fell by four percent according to Patrick Moorhead, which isn’t much considering the decline in cryptocurrency shipments over the same period.

“As expected, AMD had another solid growth quarter with 2nd gen Ryzen, Ryzen mobile, and Epyc all ramping strong, leading to an overall 54% revenue gain. Ryzen units grew double-digit sequentially and Ryzen mobile doubled sequentially,” Moorhead told ExtremeTech via email. “Radeon graphics sales were down driven by a decline in blockchain revenue, but in the grand scheme of things, not very large, a 4 percent decline. It also appears AMD is starting to get some traction in the commercial workstation market, a very large market profit pool.

Epyc saw a sequential unit doubling in hyperscalers, which was expected given prior customer win announcements, but nice to see that execution. Overall, Epyc units and revenue increased 50 percent indicating a consistent upward trajectory. The follow-on 7nm and new Zen2 core server part, code-named Rome, is sampling and the company considers it looking “healthy,” a very good sign for AMD’s server future.

If we break things down by segment, AMD’s Compute and Graphics revenue dropped slightly quarter-on-quarter due to weakness in cryptocurrency sales. Growth in Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom (almost entirely driven by the enterprise chunk of the equation) offset that small decline. Overall, AMD continues to perform extremely well. It’s absolutely mandatory that the company nail its 7nm transition, but provided it does so the firm seems poised for continued success.