News AMD releases financial results for Q4 and 2019

Good job, AMD - shame the 5500 and 5600 launches didn't quite hit the spot in the same way as the 5700 did, but I suspect Radeon sales make up a pretty small % of all that revenue.

I wonder how much AMD actually makes from console contracts, though? PS4 recently became the 3rd/4th best selling console of all time, and with both next gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles using Zen CPU's and RDNA GPU's, you'd expect that to be a pretty substantial financial win for them?

 

Console chip contracts aren't cash cows, they come with caveats that make them a real pain. The main ones being required availability (i.e. regardless of what makes you the most profit to manufacture, console manufacturers get first dibs on production capacity when they demand it) and contractual cost reductions (price at which chips are sold to console manufacturers reduces in pre-arranged steps, regardless of whether actual production cost has reduced or not), on top of already very thin margins per-chip.
AMD have done well out of their semi-custom nature in effectively having them fund general GPU R&D efforts (features like Packed Math and chequerboard shading were implemented in console chips, then moved over to general consumer GPUs in subsequent generations), but in terms of revenue it's not going to be much beyond the initial sales spike (where volume and margins are at the maximum they're ever going to be).

 

The real headline is strong figures AND reducing debt by 50% AND increasing cash. Whilst I'm not a financial whiz that tells me they've made some serious profits off of Ryzen/Navi to pay down that much. It also indicates that they're not run by the typical idiots who want to load companies up with Debt and then seem surprised they struggle to pay it down when times are hard.