AMD has reported a steep rise in sales of GPUs and data centres as it races to compete with Nvidia.
Second-quarter revenue increased 9% year over year to $5.8 billion as "significantly higher sales" of data center and client processors "more than offset" declines in gaming and embedded product sales.
AMD delivered its third consecutive quarter of record data center GPU revenue with, quarterly revenue from the MI300 Series accelerators exceeding $1 billion for the first time.
It grew gross margin by more than 3%, with data center product sales accounting for almost 50% of overall sales in the quarter.
Overall, data centre segment revenue increased 115% year over year to a record high of $2.8 billion, "driven by the steep ramp of Instinct MI300 GPU shipments and a strong double-digit percentage increase in EPYC CPU sales".
"We delivered strong second-quarter financial results, with revenue coming in above the midpoint of guidance and profitability increasing by a double-digit percentage driven by higher-than-expected sales of our Instinct, Ryzen, and EPYC processors," said Lisa T. Su, President and Chief Executive Officer in an earnings call.
"We continued accelerating our AI traction as leading cloud and enterprise providers expanded availability of Instinct MI300X solutions, and we also saw positive demand signals for general-purpose compute in both our client and server processor businesses."
AMD operating income grew by more than five times over last year, driven by "higher revenue and operating leverage" even as it "significantly increased our investment in R&D.
Client segment revenue was $1.5 billion, up by just under half, with the uptick most "driven primarily" by AMD Ryzen processor sales.
Gaming segment revenue slumped by 59% year over year to $648 million.
Microsoft has expanded it use of MI300X accelerators to power GPT-4 Turbo and multiple copilot services, including Microsoft 365 Chat, Word, and Teams, aand also became the first large hyperscaler to "announce general availability of public MI300X instances in the quarter", said Mitch Haws, Vice President, Investor Relations, on the same earnings call.
"The new Azure VMs leverage the industry-leading compute performance and memory capacity of MI300X in conjunction with the latest ROCm software to deliver leadership inferencing price performance when running the latest frontier models, including GPT-4," Haws added.
"Hugging Face was one of the first customers to adopt the new Azure instances, enabling enterprise and AI customers to deploy hundreds of thousands of models on MI300X GPUs with one click. Our enterprise and cloud AI customer pipeline grew in the quarter, and we are working very closely with our system and cloud partners to ramp availability of MI300 solutions to address growing customer demand."
Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Super Micro all have platforms based around AMD's Instinct accelerators in production, and "multiple hyperscale and Tier 2 cloud providers" are "on track" to launch MI300 instances this quarter.
