🥇Digitimes: AMD sales to rise sharply in second half of year

Taiwanese resource Digitimes, citing sources in the PC industry, reports an expected increase in shipments of AMD processors, graphics accelerators and system logic for laptops, PCs and servers in the second half of 2019.

AMD's third generation Ryzen processors with the new Zen 2 architecture and matching X570 chipsets will be unveiled at Computex 2019 in late May, with new AMD server processors codenamed Rome starting to ship in mid-2019. Finally, the next-generation Navi graphics accelerators will also debut in the third quarter. All chips will be produced in compliance with the 7nm process technology.

The success of its Ryzen series processors has seen AMD's share of the desktop PC market skyrocket, while its EPYC processors servers AMD also saw a sharp increase in market share—from 1% in the last quarter of 2017 to 3,2% in the fourth quarter of 2018. AMD expects its revenue in the first quarter of 2019 to decline 12% quarter-on-quarter and 24% year-on-year due to seasonal decline and weakening graphics card shipments. Although the company launched its first 7nm graphics accelerator, the Radeon VII, in February, this product alone is still not enough to offset the sharp decline caused by the waning demand in the cryptocurrency market.

AMD also expects first-quarter 2019 revenue from specialty chip sales (such as SoCs for consoles) to decline year-over-year, but revenue from shipments of Ryzen desktop processors, EPYC for servers, and GPUs for Data centers will grow.

Due to a shortage of Intel processors since the second half of 2018, HP and Lenovo placed orders for AMD processors for their laptops, and ASUS even implemented AMD solutions in several of its gaming laptops, with sales of the latter turned out to be higher than expected. Acer and HP also use AMD platforms in their Chromebooks. With its growing popularity, AMD is expected to significantly increase its market share in the notebook market.

AMD Ryzen 3000 processors with Zen 2 architecture and X570 chipsets will be the first platform to support PCIe Gen 4 technology. Due to the good price-performance ratio of this bundle, many motherboard manufacturers have increased plans to ship their motherboards based on the AMD 500 series of chips.

Currently, AMD's profit from the graphics accelerator business is mainly provided by market demand. data centers, while Google's new cloud-streaming gaming platform, Stadia, will also be purchasing AMD accelerators for its servers.