AMD needed 2017 to be a big success for the company. After years of stagnation and failed promises to offer true competition in the CPU and GPU markets, it was facing a rocky road ahead and in 2016 there was even some suggestion that the company's days might have been numbered. That turned out not to be the case though, as throughout this year, Ryzen CPUs have proved to be stiff competition for Intel for the first time in over a decade and although Vega RX cards didn't quite live up to expectations, they're hardly slouches.
All of that has lead to AMD posting a profit for the first time in an age. It's net income was $71 million for the past quarter. This comes off of the back of $1.64 billion in revenue and around $126 million in income. Compare that to Q3 2016, where it lost a total of $293 million and this is a huge turnaround for the company.
Part of that is because in that period last year it had to pay out $340 million to alter its longstanding agreement with Global Foundries for fabrication, but that turned out to be worth it considering the success that lay ahead for Ryzen.
"Strong customer adoption of our new high-performance products drove significant revenue growth and improved financial results from a year ago," said AMD president and CEO, Lisa Su (via PCGN).
It's not just gamers driving sales though. AMD graphics cards might not have proved to be the best cards for rendering pixels when compared with Nvidia hardware, but cryptocurrency miners bought them up like hot cakes, making it hard to find AMD cards for the past few months at respectable prices. It even lead to the creation of mining specific cards, which have also proved to be popular.
The upcoming launch of the Xbox One X, which as usual, packs AMD graphical hardware, could be another big boon for the hardware maker towards the end of this year.
How has AMD's success affected your hardware? Have you moved over any of your systems to Ryzen or Vega?