AMD announced its Q1 2021 earnings earlier today in what turned out to be one of the best quarters in the company’s history. The first quarter of 2021 saw the chipmaker yield a revenue of $3,445 million, a massive gain of 93% compared to the same period last year. Compared to the last quarter, that’s an increase of six percent, driven by monumental gains in the Compute and Graphics Division as well as the Semi-Custom and Enterprise Segments.
The gross margin remained flat at 46%, seeing an increase of 1% compared to the last quarter while the operating expenses were down by 9% YoY and flat quarter-over-quarter. The operating income grew by a massive 223% YoY to $762 million (from $236 million), an increase of 15% compared to the last quarter. Similarly, the operating margin was up 9 points to 22%, from 13% last year.
Unlike the last quarter where the next-gen consoles (semi-custom business) contributed a major chunk to the company’s overall revenue, this time around the Ryzen|Radeon and Epyc businesses were the primary driving factors as the chip shortages severely limited the semi-custom sales. The Computing and Graphics Division saw a YoY increase of 46% and a QoQ gain of 15%, bringing the quarterly revenue from the segment to $2,100 million and the operating income to $485 million, a YoY increase of 85%.
The Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom Division were led by the Epyc Milan sales, seeing an increase of 286% in revenue compared to last year, and a whopping 1,165% increase with respect to the operating income. Compared to the last quarter, this is an increase of 5% in revenue and 14% in the OI.
This was the first quarter in quite a while where the average sales prices of both the Ryzen CPUs and Radeon GPUs grew both year-on-year as well as quarter-over-quarter. The latter is attributed to the higher sales and ASP of the Big Navi graphics cards, namely the RX 6800 XT and 6900 XT, however, small the sales volume was.
The Enterprise and Semi-custom division also saw record sales due to the introduction of the next-gen consoles and the 3rd Gen Epyc processors. The YoY increase was driven by both while the quarter-over-quarter increase was primarily the result of higher Epyc sales, slightly offset by lower than expected console sales.
The Q2 2021 revenue is expected to be even higher than Q1 with a forecast of $3.6 billion, a gross margin of 47%, and an operating expense of $900 million. For FY2021, the company is expecting a growth of 50% compared to the previous year and a gross margin of 47%.
