AMD smashed its prior revenue performance, with a 53% improvement year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2020 and a 45% improvement for the year over 2019.
Annual revenue for 2020 was $9.76 billion, a record, driven by higher revenue in both computing and graphics and the enterprise, embedded and semi-custom segment, AMD reported late Tuesday. The company expects 37% revenue growth in 2021 with strength across all business segments such as server and PC chips semi-custom gaming consoles as well as consumer and data center graphics products.
CEO Lisa Su said the strong growth in 2021 will also come from the strength of AMD’s new products and improved customer demand. The reception to AMD’s third generation EPYC Milan chip for data center and cloud providers is “very strong,” she said. “You’ll also see a very strong enterprise portfolio” as part of a launch plan expected for later in current quarter.
The company saw revenues in enterprise, embedded and semi-custom chips reach $1.28 billion for the quarter, up 176% year-over-year, driven by higher semi-custom and Ryzen processor sales. That division sells server chips and CPUs and GPUs for game consoles. In 2020, PC sales grew by 13%, but AMD’s client processor revenues grew 50%, Su noted. The company introduced more than 20 chips based on the 7nm process.
Fourth quarter revenue hit $3.24 billion with strength in the same segments. That was well above analyst estimates. Shares closed the day at 94.71, up less than 1%.
Su told analysts that AMD had reached an “inflection point” in a long journey to establish itself as a high-performance computing leader. “Our strong 2020 and 2021 guidance show growing momentum and robust demand for high performance computing,” she said. Adoption of HPC will accelerate in coming years with the growing adoption of cloud, digital transformation and exascale computing and mainstream adoption of AI, she added.
Su said that the purchase of Xilinx, first announced in October for $35 billion in stock, will broaden AMD’s technology capabilities. She disclosed that the purchase has passed several regulatory hurdles and is still expected to close by the end of 2021.