AMD revenues jump 18 per cent in first quarter as the company unleashes Ryzen

Ryzen CPUs and Vega graphics cards expected to help the company increase revenues throughout the year

AMD has shown signs of life after revenues jumped by 18 per cent in the first quarter, a period that coincided with the release of the first of the company's long-awaited Ryzen PC microprocessors.

The company unveiled revenues of 984m, up from $832m in the same quarter in 2016, while the company's net losses reduced, 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.