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AMD Businesses Hardware

AMD Posts First Loss in Years as Consumer Chip Sales Plummet by 65% (tomshardware.com) 44

Posted by msmash from the tough-luck dept.
AMD has posted its first quarterly loss in years due to weak sales of processors for client PCs. From a report: Overall, AMD's chip sales dropped 64%. AMD's data center and gaming hardware shipments remained strong and were flat year-over-year, which is quite an achievement given the slowing purchases of servers and weak demand for gaming hardware among consumers. While AMD's management expects the CPU market to start recovering in the second half of the year, the company's outlook for Q2 is not that optimistic.

In the first quarter of FY2023, AMD's revenue amounted to $5.353 billion, which is a 9% decrease compared to the same period in the previous year and a slight decrease compared to the previous quarter. Unfortunately, the company slipped into the red with a $139 million net loss as compared to a $786 million net income in Q1 FY2022. Additionally, AMD's gross margin decreased from 48% in Q1 FY2022 to 44% in Q1 FY2023. [...] AMD's results were a mixed bag as all of the company's business units except its Client Computing business remained more or less flat compared to the first quarter of FY2022, and even remained profitable. In fact, AMD's Data Center unit even managed to modestly increase its revenue, yet its profitability declined.
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AMD Posts First Loss in Years as Consumer Chip Sales Plummet by 65% More

AMD Posts First Loss in Years as Consumer Chip Sales Plummet by 65%

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  • I'd buy one, if the motherboards were not shit, while costing twice as much.

    My current rig has a 5900x with an ITX motherboard that boasts Thunderbolt 3. There are ZERO ITX motherboards for AM5 w/ thunderbolt 3, and several have even removed sound card entirely!? And yet, they STILL cost twice as much as this AM4 board I already have.

    Is it really worth it to shovel out all the $$$ for a slightly faster CPU, but cutting out all the other features I ACTUALLY use day-to-day?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      AM5 is not quite ready yet.

      • Never Buy First Generation Tech

        AM5 needs to mature a bit. AND last gen AM4 is still Amazingly good for 99% of the people out there (and is substantially cheaper)

        • Yeah I just went to an AM4 board (plus a 5600x) about 2.5 months ago on an upgrade and feel just fine with it. The motherboard cost me a whopping $79.

          About the only drawback is that it only supports up to PCIe 3.0 but honestly with my video card (6650 XT) the performance difference between PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 is less than 10% and I only game at 1080p and leave VSYNC on anyways so I'm not chasing FPS.

    • ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 by chance?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by darkain ( 749283 )

        The one and only! I've got a pair of them. Freaggin love the board. In my opinion, its the best damn ITX board ever made so far.

  • to make stonks recover.

  • Lockdown boost is over (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @12:28PM (#63494550)

    Back to the usual business.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      I think its more that the pandemics sales boom actually stole sales from the future. Plus the Ryzen 7000 series is really expensive for cpu+board+memory.

      • Too many new variables in the setup. Completely new socket, new ram type (DDR5), etc. All of that costs extra. AM4 and DDR4 are good for me and are cheap. Hell my home rig is running 64GB of RAM right now just because DDR4 RAM is like stupid cheap at the moment.

  • I see that one reason for lower profits is that there are too many CPU models to select between.

    There used to just be a single basic model, just with different clock frequencies for each generation. Now there are so many models that nobody really can keep track of them. It's after all the consumers that have to pay for them.

    After all when there are always coming new models around the corner consumers starts to get hesitant buying.

    Another factor is that we have had a downturn in the economy, and that also co

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Maybe in the 486 days, but Pentium+ has always been like this IMO

    • There used to just be a single basic model, just with different clock frequencies for each generation.

      Sure, through the 68010 and 80286. But Motorola had three to five versions of every 68k chip from the '020 on and you could buy literally all of them at the same time, there were two distinct versions of 386, five or six versions of 486 (and more if you count the different vendors) and so on.

    • Re:Too many models? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sarren1901 ( 5415506 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @01:54PM (#63494844)

      There is also very little reason to upgrade for most people. Any hardware from the last ten years is perfectly good for most everything outside of gaming. Web browsing, posting on forums, watching videos and office work don't require much in the way of hardware. Most new games aren't really any better then games from a decade ago so there is also little reason to upgrade if you don't play modern games.

      I could see if you were doing video editing and movie making or some other CPU/GPU heavy workload you may need a better system more often, but that's probably less then 10% of the market, tops.

      The next killer app for me will be when I have a hardware failure and can't get a replacement. Then I'll be forced to upgrade.

      I suppose that's what Windows 11 is all about for the industry. Force people to upgrade to new hardware so that new DRM works. Wow, what an incentive, I tell you! I'll just stick to Linux and be happy.

      • You're right, and I'd add.. the recent Windows development are actively discouraging some people (like me) from upgrading. As you said the main reason to upgrade is gaming, however I just hate the restrictions Windows is coming up with (ads in the start-up bar, the new /. story on forcing Outlook to open links in Edge, aggressively pushing their MSFT account, or just the uncontrollable system updates if you're on consumer Windows). My computer is now at 5 years, which is typically when I'd upgrade for gamin

  • I am typing this on a laptop with an Intel Core i7 8th gen processor, which is 5 years old, and still massively overpowered. Why because most of the stuff I do, is hooked to the cloud and handled over the web, or an application which has the web browser built in, or does internet calls to some server somewhere which does the processing and gives me the results.

    I have no needs for an upgrade, and I even don't care what OS I am running on anymore, or even what browser. Because it is in essence just a dumb t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      Even if you don't use any sort of cloud service, most CPUs are still overpowered for 99% of the tasks, even gaming unless you're going for 120 fps stuff.

      • and even then, it really takes a lot for even a midrange CPU to become a bottleneck.

    • The laptop I am typing this on is 13 years old. It's a Toshiba with an AMD A6 in it... The only thing I've done is max out the RAM and put an SSD in it... it still does everything I need it to do.

  • What I need to know is: do we buy, or do we sell? I feel like if in the next few days the price dips down to what it was last October then it's a real bargain. But this is stonks, and the trick is to not be left holding the bag when things go bad. (recession soon?)

    • Depends on your time frame. It's expected that the results will be poor this year as even TSMC expects poor overall results. With all of the customers TSMC has they should have the best view on what the business looks like so I'm not expecting much this year. Next year is when things turn around. The only question is just how good will next year be?

  • I am sure AM5 didn't help (Score:4, Informative)

    by Osgeld ( 1900440 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @12:59PM (#63494646)

    Least in the consumer market jumping to AM5 is just not that appealing. The chips are expensive, the ram is expensive, and the motherboards are outrageous. While I am sure the new platform is "faster" its also not plonking down a couple bills to go from a 2700 to a 5700X and still not even coming close to using 100% cpu utilization

    • and still not even coming close to using 100% cpu utilization

      And you never will. A CPU hitting 100% utilization is a function of a very specific workload it gets at a time, and not remotely related to the perceived performance of the end user. There are many workloads that benefit from a CPU upgrade (including gaming) where you never hit even 20% of the CPU load. CPU utilisation is a poor judge of performance for anything other than rendering or simulation tasks. And that's before you get into topics of memory, I/O and peripheral connectivity the CPU provides.

      But yes

  • Fix ROCm (Score:3)

    by aldousd666 ( 640240 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @02:59PM (#63495082) Journal
    With the advent of Open Source deep learning platforms, they could use an update to ROCm that brings plug-n-play to their GPU hardware for use with TensorFlow and PyTorch. It wouldn't even need to be state of the art. Academics would probably use AMD exclusively if it worked and was price competitive enough, not to mention Joe Cryptodirt in his garage.
  • AMD only lost money because of the write down from acquisition, etc. This is just tax avoidance maneuver. Non-GAAP they made almost a billion this quarter. 65% sale decline was for PC, which we already saw last quarter.

  • Intel got hammered with revenue declines in excess of 30% in key areas like datacenter. AMD was merely flat, with client being their only weak point.

    Overall AMD was only down around 9% year-over-year.

    Client doesn't matter that much to them anymore.

    • Uh, no.
      DC was down 65% as well.
      Client was just the only segment that had an actual operating loss (negative cash outflow)
      AMD made staved off an Intel-sized loss with their Embedded segment.
  • Sigh. "Loss" means either an outflow of cash, or a drop in value of a held asset. This is neither. It's accountant-speak for "We made less money this quarter than we did last quarter." They are still operating in the black, only less so than they would have liked. Wake me up once they go into the red, i.e. expenses exceed revenue.
    • Nope. They mean loss*

      * In the segment in question.
      About -$179M in operating loss in the client segment.

      Contrast that with DC, where revenue was also down ~65%, but still maintained an operating profit.

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