AMD shows signs of turnaround following 18 per cent rise in first quarter revenues

Sales of Ryzen PC CPUs and Vega graphics cards expected to gather pace throughout the year

AMD, Intel's faded rival in the PC and server microprocessor market, has shown signs that its turnaround might be gathering pace following an 18 per cent rise in revenues in the first quarter.

The company used the May Day bank holiday weekend to unveil its results, with revenues weighing in at $984m, up from $832m in the same quarter in 2016. The company's net losses were also down, from $109m to $73m.

The company suggested that its revenues in the second quarter - the current quarter - would be up by 17 per cent on the first quarter (plus or minus three per cent): therefore forecasting revenues of around $1.15bn.

The rising revenues come as AMD CEO Lisa Su nears the completion of her turnaround strategy for the company, which initially included a strong focus on winning bread-and-butter business with Sony and Microsoft gaming consoles deals, while the company developed the Zen microprocessor architecture to close the performance gap with Intel.

In the first quarter, AMD claims that revenues in its Computing & Graphics division were up by 29 per cent to $593m partly on the back of the Ryzen 7 launch, but also thanks to discounting of legacy chip architectures that would otherwise be eclipsed by the Ryzen launch, and the popularity of Polaris-based graphics cards, which have been keenly priced.

In the current quarter, in addition to the launch of the mainstream Ryzen 5 microprocessor family, it will also be releasing graphics cards based on its new Vega microarchitecture, which will better compete with Nvidia's 10-series graphics cards that have turned heads over the past year.

In early July, the company is expected to release its low-end Ryzen 3 microprocessor line, and some new microprocessor parts are also expected to be released at Computex in Taiwan at the end of May. These include some 16-core and possibly 32-core Ryzen-based CPUs, focused on the server and data centre markets than the Ryzen releases so far.

The company previewed its forthcoming 'Naples' server CPUs at the beginning of March, which the company claimed "exceeds today's top competitive offering on critical parameters, with 45 per cent more cores, 60 per cent more input/output capacity, and 122 per cent more memory bandwidth".

Later in the year, the company will be releasing its Ryzen Mobile - codenamed Raven Ridge - APUs intended for laptops. These will pair a Ryzen CPU with a Vega GPU, but are not expected to appear until nearer the autumn at the earliest.