Su predicts the total addressable PC market will shrink 10 percent this year, to around 260 million units. (IDC reported this month that 292.3 million PCs shipped in 2022, with both IDC and Gartner suggesting that the recovery could take as long as 2024). Su says AMD expects “a softer first half and a stronger second half.”
While AMD predicts that both its client processor and gaming revenue will continue to fall next quarter, even as its new Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs, 7000 laptop CPUs, and RDNA 3 mobile chips hit shelves, Su says that in actually has 25 percent. more laptop design wins this year, with 250 different AMD-powered laptops set to hit the shelves.
The company’s profit sank to just $21 million this quarter, a 98 percent decline, but it says most of it was due to the Xilinx acquisition. Its revenue from client processors and gaming GPUs fell 51% and 7% in the fourth quarter, respectively.
As AMD waits for demand to pick up, Su says the company has been “subshipping” its processors and GPUs to market. While he can find some discounts due to “current marketing programs and price incentives,” Su says the company has been focused on matching supply with demand as soon as possible. “We’re going to outsource to a lesser extent in the first quarter,” she says.
research company Gartner says the current PC drop “marks the largest quarterly drop in shipments since Gartner began tracking the PC market in the mid-1990s.” He wrote that the combination of inflation, rising interest rates, “the anticipation of a global recession” and the fact that many people have already bought a new PC during the pandemic have plunged demand for new PCs.