AMD Gaming GPU division soars 165% thanks to XOne and PS4

AMD brought in record revenues for their GPU division ending 2013 on a positive note. Revenue was $865 million with a operating profit of $121 million. Never in the history of AMD's GPU division has AMD brought in that much money since AMD brought ATI in 2006. Even going back to the ATI days ATI didn't bring in that much money. Looks like the $5.4 billion AMD spent to buy ATI in 2006 is starting to pay dividends.

You can thank strong sales of XOne and PS4 for the 4+ million unit sales and even a little bit of the litecoin mining craze which benefited AMD.

I would still rate AMD as in critical but stable condition as AMD hasn't been consistent. It's topsy turvey for them. Sometimes they do good sometimes they don't. So, AMD needs to do well in every quarter not just one quarter.

Hopefully, people will continue to buy XOne and PS4 so people can start to rake in the cash throughout ALL of 2014. A competitive AMD is good for ALL Gamers.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/01/22/increasing-focus-on-new-growth-markets-helps-amd-close-2013-on-a-positive-note/

Good news... I always preferred AMD over Intel and Nvidia. Although my last laptop is Intel and Nvidia lol

good for them... also competition always good for everyone.

I'm glad the console deal went through since there graphics cards plan has been a laughing stock the last 3 months or so

I think Bitcoin mining has helped them a lot more than the PS4/Xbox One.

Bitcoin ming should of helped them but it didn't help them as much as people think.

The R9 290 and R9 290x where having stock issues before the mining boom (which is pathetic). There where only two 280x brands in stock by Black Friday which was a week before the mining boom.

As a result people flooded the used 7950/7970 market which technically didn't make AMD any money.

AMD having stock issues prevented the mining boom from being a significant hit

If only AMD products didn't overheat so much :[

there are a lot more xbones and PS4s than amateur internet monopoly money miners

I hate Bitcoin miners, they drove the prices of most GPU's up...

I don't know how people can make money off bitcoins..its a digital currency, what can digital currency possibly buy?

trade it for real currency

Great I like AMD they have good prices on their hardware that keeps intel and nvidia in check.

Why hate them? AMD was one foot in the grave and the market was getting dangerously close to being pretty much taken over by Nvidia. Costs go up while supplies are lower but AMD is finally turning profits and has a renewed reason to make ultra powerful GPUs.

These miners are fantastic for the future of custom built PCs, a market who's future is a bit uncertain.

I figured how much a bitch Nvidia could be these days with proprietary crap, so I'm all AMD now. I do prefer Intel over AMD though of because better single core performance although I have an FX 8350 and I'm fine with it.

AMD has some pretty neat architecture features like HSA and clustered cores that do threads simultaneously compared to hyperthreading.

How can you trade "fake" money for real money? How is this possible?

I don't really hate what the are doing, but do they really have to buy GPU's in bulk? Most GPU's are out of stock because these people buy like 50 of them at one time.

Well there's something called an exchange rate. And some places do accept bitcoin.

Is it any more strange than going to best buy and giving someone pieces of paper in exchange for a television?

Dunno but I'm kicking myself for not jumping on the Bitcoin train months ago when 1BC was worth over $1000.

~$80,000 worth of Dogecoins got the jamaican bobsledding team to the olympics.

@Xtasy26: That's awesome! So that means that Nvidia is going to have to step it up.

I would like to add that they made a profit of $89 million nearly double the profit in the quarter prior. Let's see if they can keep it up.

Yeah the FX 8350 is an excellent CPU, keeps up with intel's high end CPU and even beats it in some cases.

And HSA is pretty cool. I have high hopes for HSA and the potential it brings.

If you are talking about the stock they have then yes. Other wise the R9 290/290X are excellent GPUs. This is what really pi**ed me off about AMD. It's been TWO FREAKING months yet they R9 290/290X are still overpriced. This is unacceptable. I have been looking for a R9 290 but there is no WAY that I am going to be paying for those at the price they are selling them on newegg.

I am just curious how would one go about actually selling their litecoins for actual cash. Do you go to a online place where people would give you money through paypal or something?

This is a good point. Also, it might make those people who made custom built PCs to keep thier GPUs and actually play PC games on them. Once you play games on the PC I think it would be hard to go back to consoles.

B.S.

Amd sold as many as 7 million chips to Sony and Microsoft (some of them could've been the quarter before. Even if AMD makes 10x more on every chip they sell to a Bitcoin miner (which is way too high), that would mean that they sold 700,000 GPUs just to bitcoin miners. There is no way that can be true. There aren't enough scrypt miners for that (because most big SHA-256 miners buy asics)

That's good, now AMD can use this money to figure out how to make their CPUs not suck.

your wish is granted.

their roadmap now predicts no more cpus, only apus. this wish was brought to you by carls jr.

i guess i'd consider their apus for like an htpc build or something. but i just run with intel cpus now. just anecdotal - but they are rock solid stable. i don't mind the price premium.

That's not my wish. I wanted them to make good CPUs, not APUs only. Oh well, one day dedicated GPUs will be a thing of the past, as well as desktop PCs. It will be interesting.

There isn't any customs ASICs for Litecoin mining yet. There will be mass availability by I would say this summer. Meanwhile if you want to do litecoin mining there is only AMD GPUs since LItecoin is memory intensive unlike bitcoin (for which there is already) customs ASICs out. This is why I suspect AMD GPUs at least the R9 290/290X are still selling at a higher price.

I know that, like I said the only people who are buying GPUs for mining are people mining Scrypt because SHA-256 people buy asics. There is no way that enough miners are buying GPUs to "help AMD more than the PS4/Xbox One" like you claimed. I won't disagree that they make money on GPUs because of Mining and that they are probably selling a little higher (maybe 5-10%) than they would without mining, but there is no way it has more of an impact on AMDs bottom line than the Xbox One and PS4. That is crazy.

I don't know what the exact numbers are but it is a significant enough boost in demand that cards that were selling for $200 over the summer are now selling for $400. Again I don't know what the exact boost is but it's more than 5 to 10% or else it wouldn't drive up demand and prices this much. What happened and is happening is pretty much unprecedented in the PC world. You never see computer parts actually increase over time. It's almost always the other way around. So yeah it is a huge deal and probably has just as much to do with AMD's recent success as the Xbone and PS4.

What is real money backed by nowadays? Unless it is backed by gold or some other tangible item, it is essentially fake.

These digital currencies are basically the same.

Ever consider how "Real" money is in the first place? Money is worth the value you put into it, and obviously much like most of our "Real" money being in banks as a set of numbers, bitcoins (A set of digital numbers) has "Worth" to people.

Bitcoins have as much perceived worth as the "Real Money" you have right now.

I will only be interested in a AMD GPU if Mantle ever takes off

It will be interesting to see Nvidias crying fit rage.

Nvidia is butthurt

Pretty terrifying to think about, really.

I don't think I claimed that litecoin mining helped AMD more than then Xbox One and PS4 sales if look at my opening statments. However, if you do look at their statements it did help to certain extent as they saw increased demand for the GPU's and higher "ASPs" selling prices for their GPUs.

I don't know much about that seeing my current card (6GB 7970 GHz Edition) is my first AMD card, but it runs very quiet and doesn't give me any heating issues.

@AmazonTreeBoa: really? then it must be mines... I used to use Intel processor and Nvidia graphics card now i have both processor and graphics cards as AMD and they used to get extremely hot quick. I had to move my desktop to a different spot and it helped quite a bit. Other than that i have no complaints with them. Intel and Nvidia over charge too much... :/

More like thanks to bitcoin