Enlarge / AMD’s EPYC server processors are benefitting from Intel’s delays. (credit: AMD)
Earnings reports for tech companies this quarter have been mixed at best. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and others have managed to eke out a little growth, while the likes of Meta and Nintendo shrank a little, and most companies’ projections for the next quarter are also less-than-optimistic.
One company that has been hit particularly hard is Intel, which saw its revenues decline from $19.6 billion in Q2 of 2021 to $15.3 billion in 2022. The company’s earnings presentation (PDF) showed weakness across the board for a variety of reasons: weaker demand for consumer PCs, money invested in getting the Arc dedicated graphics products off the ground, and “competitive pressure” in the server CPU market.
That competitor is AMD, whose EPYC line of server processors was just one bright spot in a record quarter for the company. Revenue increased from $3.9 billion in Q2 of 2021 to $6.6 billion this year, with $673 million of that additional revenue coming from EPYC processor sales and the company’s data center division. This is a big deal for AMD, which had some success with its Opteron server CPUs in the mid-2000s but had mostly ceded that ground to Intel throughout the 2010s.
