AMD posts record $5.9 billion first-quarter revenue, despite PC market slowdown

What just happened? It's been another excellent quarter for AMD. Q1 2022 saw the hardware giant generate a record $5.9 billion in revenue, beating analysts' expectations and marking a 71.2% increase compared to the same period a year earlier. Net income was also up, by 22% YoY to $786 million.

AMD's enterprise, embedded, and semi-custom segment was the quarter's high earner, bringing in $2.5 billion for a yearly growth rate of 88%. Its operating income was even more impressive, seeing growth of 218% compared to a year earlier.

AMD's semi-custom sales, which cover the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Steam Deck, grew by a double-digit percentage YoY. "Sales for this game console generation continue to outpace all prior generations, and we expect 2022 to be a record year for our semi-custom business," said CEO Dr. Lisa Su.

It was another record quarter for AMD's computing and graphics business. This brought in $2.8 billion of revenue---up 33% from a year ago and up 8% from the previous quarter---a jump that has been put down its Ryzen CPU and Radeon GPU sales. Three Radeon RX 6000-series cards entered last month's Steam Survey, joining what had been the lone RDNA 2 GPU in the chart, and Ryzen chips took another slice of Intel's CPU share.

News of this segment's success is especially welcome as it comes at a time when PC sales are slowing following the pandemic-induced boom that saw much of the world working from home.

"Although the PC market is experiencing some softness coming off multiple quarters of near-record unit shipments, our focus remains on the premium, gaming and commercial portions of the market where we see strong growth opportunities and expect to continue gaining overall client revenue share," Su added.

AMD confirmed that it had completed the acquisition of Xilinx in February. It said that if the six weeks of revenue from the deal had not been included in the results, its overall revenue would have only increased 55% YoY to $5.3 billion.

The outlook is equally positive for the second quarter of the year. AMD predicts Q2 2022 revenue to hit $6.5 billion (+/- $200 million), which is 69% more than a year earlier and up 10% from the prior quarter.

AMD's stock price has jumped around 6% since announcing its Q1 financial results. But like Intel and Nvidia, its shares have fallen (39%) since the start of the year.