AMD's client PC division is going gangbusters. The company has just had its latest earnings call with the usual high-end bean counters and among other positive news, AMD says that revenues from its Client PC division are up by an epic 68% compared to the same period last year. Boom.
That's mostly PC processor sales, underlining the broader narrative that AMD's latest Ryzen CPUs, including the Ryzen 7 9800 X3D, are a smash hit. Indeed, AMD CEO Lisa Su hailed the new CPU family as a "best seller" and "the CPU of choice for gamers."
However, it wasn't all good news. AMD's Gaming division reported yet another drop in revenue, falling a hefty 30% year-on-year from an already much diminished position. The Gaming division includes both graphics cards for PCs and chips for consoles.
The latter were approaching the end of a product cycle for the period in question, which was the first quarter of 2025. What's more, it's probably too early to see the impact of AMD's latest Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs.
Su once again highlighted the early sales success of the RX 9070 and 9070 XT, saying, "first week sellout set a record, and was more than 10x higher than our previous best Radeon launch." But we've heard that before and no new information was provided in that regard.
Long story short, we'll have to wait for AMD's second quarter results to see if RDNA 4 really is bringing in the cash. AMD does say it expects the Gaming division to grow next quarter, so we'll be watching closely when the numbers come out.
The other bad news story involves AI chips. Well, bad news up to a point. Su said AI GPU sales were up, "by a significant double-digit percentage year-over-year," but declined to say exactly how much. No doubt the figure wasn't quite as impressive as she would have liked, otherwise it would have been touted as a badge of honour.
More worrisome, however, was the revelation from AMD's CFO Jean Hu that the company expects to lose out on $1.5 billion in AI GPU revenue thanks to export restrictions that apply to China.
Still, first quarter revenue for the company as a whole was up by 36%, year-on-year, to $7.4 billion. So, the overall picture is pretty rosy. However, just to put that figure into context, it's slightly below the $7.6 billion Intel reported in the same quarter, just for its Client Computing Group, which excludes server chip sales.
In other words, there's plenty of scope left for AMD to pinch market share from Intel. Apart from gaming GPU sales, the other area where AMD could probably stand to improve its performance involves laptop CPUs.
AMD doesn't break out mobile CPU sales from the rest of its Client group. But anecdotally, at least, the laptop market still seems to be dominated by Intel. Notably, the latest Razer Blade 16 has made the switch from Intel to AMD. But the broader industry-wide move towards AMD that we thought may happen this year doesn't appear to be playing out, for now at any rate.
