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The company surpassed the forecasts thanks to strong gaming and data center chip sales.

Computer chip maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced its Q4 and FY 2020 financial results this week. The reports showed strong fourth quarter revenue and profits that far exceeded analysts’ expectations.

Financial analysts had been forecasting AMD’s profit at 47 cents per share on $3.03 billion in sales for Q4. However, the company reported a profit before certain costs such as stock compensation of 52 cents per share on revenue of $3.24 billion.

Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD, was beaming with satisfaction on the earnings call with reporters. “2020 marked an inflection point in our long-term journey as we made significant progress establishing AMD as the high-performance computing leader,” she said.

“We significantly accelerated our business and exceeded our aggressive growth goals for the year while navigating industrywide challenges caused by COVID-19,” she added.

PC, Gaming, Data Center products drove AMD’s growth

Su then pointed to the deciding factors in the good news. “We built substantial momentum throughout the year as we successfully ramped volume production of more than 20 7-nanometer PC, gaming, and data center products,” she explained. ‘While the PC market grew approximately 13% in 2020…our annual client processor revenue grew by more than 50%,” she crowed.

She added that the gaming business got a boost from the release of Microsoft Corp.’s and Sony Corp.’s new Xbox and PlayStation 5 games consoles.

Ryzen and EPYC processor adoption also fueled sales

Su went on to say that the surge in growth was due in part to the increase in AMD Ryzen processor adoption. Adoption of EPYC processors also accelerated significantly in 2020, she said. Also, the chips were proving popular across cloud, enterprise, and HPC customers.

“We set a new all-time record for annual server processor revenue,” Su boasted. “Server processor sales more than doubled year over year, and our overall data center sales are now a high-teens percentage of our total annual revenue,” she added.

“Looking at the fourth quarter, we ended the year very strong.”