AMD is seeing phenomenal success in recent years. That's no secret. As their latest sales figures suggest, it seems like they're only gaining even more ground in the PC hardware market. And this is thanks mostly to the consistent success of their Ryzen line.
Guru3D reports that AMD has made USD $3.45 billion in total revenue for the first quarter of 2021. These figures were consistently going up 93% year-over-year since the second quarter of 2019, and were primarily driven by excellent sales in their CPU and graphics departments. Custom sales, like the work they did with the current-generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft, also contributed a good chunk to the total revenue.
Aside from that, AMD is also having a renaissance in the data-center space. While it's not really Ryzen that's driving numbers up here (it's Epyc, their line of server processors), data-center revenue is pushing AMD stock prices up 3%, according to Market Watch.
Read also : AMD Ryzen 5 5600 6 Core Is The Best Gaming Chip? Performs Better Than Intel Core i7 10700 8 Core
The Ryzen Effect
Say what you want, but the real reason why we're talking about AMD almost every day in this era is Ryzen. When it launched in 2017, Ryzen catapulted its maker to stardom in the PC hardware space basically overnight.
It hasn't been a fair fight, too. According to an article on TechRadar, AMD improved so much on the forgettable and underwhelming Bulldozer CPUs. The competition, on the other hand, stagnated. Ryzen continued to see major upgrades, while the Core series kept on relying on refreshes and barely even moved from using old fabrication processes. This allowed Ryzen to take over the market, which it hasn't relinquished since.
Now, AMD is beating Intel so hard it's not even funny anymore. The Ryzen 5000 series of CPUs is currently lording over Intel's 10th gen and even 11th gen lineup, sometimes even blowing the competition out of the water. For example, the Ryzen 9 5950X (and even the Ryzen 5 5600X) outperforms the top-end i9 10900K in single-core performance by as much as 20%.
And against the latest 11th gen CPUs from Intel, it's also no fair fight (at least on the high-end). Remember that Intel's current-gen top end shrunk back to 8 cores and 16 threads, hoping to compete with the 5950X by relying on high clock speeds. Spoiler alert: it didn't go well, with many reviewers calling the Core i9 11900K one of the worst flagship processors ever made.
Ryzen has come a long way since its launch, when it offered the same number of cores and threads as Intel's top-end SKUs for half the price. First-generation Zen CPUs were just a much better value proposition. What used to be products only available for the hardcore enthusiast were now accessible for even budget computer builders.
What's Next?
Come Q2 2021, AMD expects their revenue numbers to increase to around USD $3.6 billion in total. Aside from that, they're also looking forward to 86% year-over-year increase moving forward in all of their businesses, not just the CPU department.
Are they still going to rely on Ryzen sales with stocks of their RDNA2 RX 6000 GPUs being almost non-existent? Perhaps. It's worth noting that the upcoming 5000 series "Cezanne" APUs, while only being available to OEMs early this year, will be giving DIY PC builders a great alternative to ride out the 2021 GPU shortage. With so many gamers out of graphics cards to buy, this is likely going to be the trend.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by RJ Pierce
