AMD reported a profit of $89 million, compared with a year-earlier loss of $473 million. However AMD have warned that revenue will shrink by as much as 16% due to a shrinking market. Sales jumped 38% mainly thanks to Xbox One & PS4 consoles.
This is good news for everyone, Nvidia and Intel fans alike. We could see some price restructuring and more money thrown into AMD’s R&D division. The question is: Where are they focused? I’m willing to gamble that their primary focus will be targeted at mobiles as the mobile market has been growing year on year while the desktop market has been shrinking. Will they throw out an enthusiast CPU/APU this year to force Intel’s hand? Time will tell.
AMD have already announced a new AM1 platform, which is a low power desktop APU socket carrying the same cores as found in the Xbox one & ps4 but at a lower count of 4, along with GCN GPU cores. HTPC/ steambox anyone?
AMD’s initial Kaveri APU sales look a bit bleek, time will tell if HSA will really take off, it looks fantastic on paper. Kaveri has 4 CPU cores and 8 GPU compute units, with HSA enabled apps you are looking at (in theory) a 12 core processor, however in the APU to follow (Excavator) you wont need any HSA coded apps as the APU will automatically assign workloads. Interesting times ahead. We should see some HSA benchmarks this week or next.