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CEO Lisa Su says AMD is now a data center-first company — DC is now 4X larger than its gaming sales

Spyxos

Member
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Back in the day, the bulk of AMD's business was client CPUs for midrange PCs, but today, most of AMD's money comes from its sales of EPYC processors for data centers. To that end, AMD had every right to call itself a data center company for quite some time. Yet, this week, Lisa Su, chief executive of the chip designer, formally said (via SeekingAlpha) that AMD is now a 'data center first' company.

"In our last quarter, I think data center was over 50% of our revenue," said Lisa Su at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia And Technology Conference. "So, we really are a data center-first company."

Indeed, last quarter, AMD's data center revenue reached $2.834 billion, significantly higher than the performance of the company's client and gaming business, which posted $1.492 billion and $648 million in sales, respectively. AMD's data center business accounted for 48% of the company's revenue, though its EPYC CPU is its main product and source of revenue and income.

"It has been really exciting to see kind of how the datacenter market has grown for us as a business," Su added. "When you think about where we started, the data center business, as you said, we had a low single-digit share. It was a similar percentage of our revenue. In our last quarter, I think data center was over 50% of our revenue. So, we really are a datacenter first company."

When a company says that one of its businesses is clearly ahead of the other and essentially demonstrates that the entire company's focus is on this business, it is time to ask whether other business units have been put on the back burner. Given AMD's slow progress in graphics, we can draw certain conclusions.

However, underlying architectures and business decisions define the success of companies like AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. On the CPU side, AMD uses a unified Zen microarchitecture. On the GPU side, it is blending RDNA (graphics) and CDNA (compute) into UDNA, which may mean that graphics will no longer be a second-class citizen at AMD. What business decisions AMD will make with its products going forward is something only time will tell, though.

 

Bashtee

Member
Given AMD's slow progress in graphics, we can draw certain conclusions.
Yeah, they tried to split chip development. It probably made sense back then, but there are tons of problems if you try to use the RDNA GPUs for computing via ROCm. Support for the latest GPUs took forever—if they got included at all—and there still is no real competition to CUDA from Nvidia. This is a real bummer for smaller things and labs.

Lol, gamers build their businesses and then left as 2nd hand meat by said companies declaring their love for something else. Deserved.
Gamers didn't build shit. It was Sony and Microsoft. Nobody would give a fuck if they taped some Cell chips together or went Intel/Nvidia.
 

Fahdis

Member
I do, hence why Sony and Microsoft kept AMD alive. Gamers bought consoles, not AMD products. Everybody wants cheap AMD GPUs, so that Nvidia hast to lower prices - and then they buy Nvidia.

You don't see contextual causality of how brand =/= tech? Eventually, they became their own powerhouses as per brand. As far as I see it the only thing lacking is that they're not publishers.
 
Gaming better implode and we go back to the stone ages. Come all the solar storms so we can be happy in our own ignorance. /jk

Can't blame them jumping off the ship when they can be lazy with Data Center business and get more in return. I'd do the same in their place.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
Ugh you guys still do not know how the stock market works. Company has a big Quarter in one area so of course they talk about and boost that area to boost investor attention. Just like Nvidia had big AI quarters and then talked about AI being their #1 focus. Its all fishing.
 
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Fahdis

Member
Ugh you guys still do not know how the stock market works. Company has a big Quarter in one area so of course they talk about and boost that area to boost investor attention. Just like Nvidia had big AI quarters and then talked about AI being their #1 focus. Its all fishing.

Remember when Nvidia sold all their 3000 series cards during the Crypto boom to Crypto Bros? And everyone wanting a GPU was giving quickies in the Best Buy closet to the employees to reserve one for them? Yea, its like sticking around for a bad girlfriend who's cheating only for her to gaslight you into saying "don't worry about him, he's just a friend" when every night she takes a shit on your chest.

Lol, I know I'm being extreme. Companies aren't really loyal to their original install base so neither should we.
 
You don't see contextual causality of how brand =/= tech? Eventually, they became their own powerhouses as per brand. As far as I see it the only thing lacking is that they're not publishers.
They became their own powerhouse because Sony and Microsoft prevented them from going bankrupt during the Bulldozer era. The AMD Custom Chip making service mainly used by PlayStation and Xbox is what kept AMD afloat to build Zen and then CDNA which are the foundation of their success in datacentre.
Gamers didn't do anything for Radeon. If Sony went with Nvidia or Intel or Qualcomm or made their own custom hardware for the PS4 and XBO, then AMD would be dead.

Maybe DF is right and this is the start of a dark period for gaming. Nvidia left gaming focus a few years ago and saw their shares prices quadruple. Everyone just wants to make a quick buck and is leaving who made them successful in the first place.

Gamers aren't owed anything from anyone. Especially from AMD, a player who PC gaming enthusiasts have resoundingly rejected for over a decade now.
You might have an argument for Nvidia, but you know what Nvidia is.
 
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Rosoboy19

Member
Maybe DF is right and this is the start of a dark period for gaming. Nvidia left gaming focus a few years ago and saw their shares prices quadruple. Everyone just wants to make a quick buck and is leaving who made them successful in the first place.
One bright spot would be Nintendo and indie pc developers continually reminding us that cutting edge hardware advancement is not needed to make great new games.
 

Fahdis

Member
They became their own powerhouse because Sony and Microsoft prevented them from going bankrupt during the Bulldozer era. The AMD Custom Chip making service mainly used by PlayStation and Xbox is what kept AMD afloat to build Zen and then CDNA which are the foundation of their success in datacentre.
Gamers didn't do anything for Radeon. If Sony went with Nvidia or Intel or Qualcomm or made their own custom hardware for the PS4 and XBO, then AMD would be dead.

Yea, I'm not just talking about AMD. AMD itself was about to, but won out the deal with PS4 and PS5 and now PS6 because of the familiarity of x86. And really Sony didn't have any other options besides proprietary tech themselves as they're link with Nvidia was closed. Same for MS.

You still had Nvidia with their own GeForce brand during the PS4 Pro mid way getting more powerful with GTX labeled cards. Yea "The Cell" sure worked out for PS3 as we don't even have BC yet, Intel has been irrelevant forever until now, all they used to have was UHD and Iris graphics and I don't have much information about Qualcomm but all I know is they're mostly known for Mobile Snapdragons.
 
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Yea, I'm not just talking about AMD. AMD itself was about to, but won out the deal with PS4 and PS5 and now PS6 because of the familiarity of x86. And really Sony didn't have any other options besides proprietary tech themselves as they're link with Nvidia was closed. Same for MS.

You still had Nvidia with their own GeForce brand during the PS4 Pro mid way getting more powerful with GTX labeled cards. Yea "The Cell" sure worked out for PS3 as we don't even have BC yet, Intel has been irrelevant forever until now, all they used to have was UHD and Iris graphics and I don't have much information about Qualcomm but all I know is they're mostly known for Mobile Snapdragons.
Irrespective of all this B2B is what saved AMD, not B2C.

Client GPU; i.e PC Gamers, have done fuck all for AMD
Even the success with Zen initially was more heavily weighted towards semi-pros and workstation, and then Epyc moreso than just gamers.
 
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No one should be surprised by this or get in their feelings about it - top execs /senior leaders only answer to shareholders/investors and are expected to go down any avenue they can to achieve as much year-on-year growth as possible.
 
Makes sense, if they get better money there, then definitely making a universal architecture like UDNA than RDBA.

Plus they got consoles in the side to help with development
 

Toots

Gold Member
Her ordeal inspired me a song :

She hangs her head and cries on my shirt
She must be hurt very badly
Tell me what’s making you sad, Li?
Open your door, don’t hide in the dark
You’re lost in the dark, you can trust me
’Cause you know that’s how it must be

Lisa, Lisa, sad Lisa, Lisa

Her eyes like windows 11, tricklin' rain
Upon her pain getting deeper
Though my love wants to relieve her
She walks alone from wall to wall
Lost in a hall, she can’t hear me
Though I know she likes to be near me

Lisa, Lisa, sad Lisa, Lisa

Sad Violin GIF
 
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why bother comparing the two markets like this at all? There is significant overlap between the two sectors, and gaming is consumer-driven while data centred are corporate-driven.

Gaming is also a niche market which happens to just be the biggest entertainment medium in the world, but data is universal. I consider a 4x advantage to data to be underperformance considering the potential size of that market. AMD should be looking at 10x gaming with their data business within the next 3-5 years.

However, they should not lose focus on their gaming roadmap and should continue striving to becoming number 1 in that sector alongside any new businesses that comes along. Why shouldn’t their profits from the data business be ploughed back into developing their graphics cards further.

It really irks me how these large corporations keep solely chasing just the hot new thing and abandon what and who got them to where they are now in the first place.
 

tusharngf

Member
GPU business is bread and butter but DC business is risky. You may get good sales now but there is no guarantee you will have the same momentum in the market as there are numerous players competing in the same space.
 

YCoCg

Gold Member
AMD and Nvidia dont give a fuck about us!
Green side, Red side, Gamers gonna have to hide
AI, Blockchain, Crypto mining in disdain
Buisness suits, stock news, everyone in alghorthym
Scan, scan, your data, everyone's a product

All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us
All I wanna say is that
They don't really care about us

 
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mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Maybe DF is right and this is the start of a dark period for gaming. Nvidia left gaming focus a few years ago and saw their shares prices quadruple. Everyone just wants to make a quick buck and is leaving who made them successful in the first place.

I agree!
 

Quixz

Member
Lisa hasn't a produced an Nvidia beating GPU in years and wonders why gaming is contributing so little? LOL
 

ap_puff

Member
Lisa hasn't a produced an Nvidia beating GPU in years and wonders why gaming is contributing so little? LOL
More like data centers are paying $20,000 for an AMD GPU and $40,000 for an nvidia GPU.

You buying? It's all about supply and demand. TSMC has limited wafer allocations, are you going to be using your wafers to produce cards that gamers are complaining about paying <$1000 for and make a hundred bucks of margin per card, or are you gonna make the cards that have $15,000 margin per card and can't keep in stock?
 

DJ12

Member
They really only care about the data centers now.
Not hard to see why when the larger vendors are still prioritising intel chips in their flagship models.

You cannot even get a Dell XPS with Ryzen chip. (in the UK anyway)
 

ap_puff

Member
Not hard to see why when the larger vendors are still prioritising intel chips in their flagship models.

You cannot even get a Dell XPS with Ryzen chip. (in the UK anyway)
Intel basically bribes hardware vendors. They call it "market development funds". I'm not surprised the hardware vendors are complaining after taking the money and ignoring AMD and now AMD isn't willing to pick up the slack after Intel cut its marketing funds
 
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