If you've bought a Wii U, an Xbox One, or a PlayStation 4 in the last three months, at least a sliver of the money you paid went to a single company: AMD. The chipmaker provides the custom chips at the heart of Microsoft and Sony's new consoles and the GPU of the Wii U, and it rode holiday sales of all three consoles to a Q4 2013 profit of $89 million on revenue of $1.589 billion. This is up substantially from Q4 of 2012, in which AMD announced a $422 million loss on revenue of $1.155 billion.
AMD's financial tables (PDF) for the quarter illustrate the extent to which the graphics division buoyed the rest of the company. The Graphical and Visual Solutions segment, which includes GPUs for laptops, desktops, and workstations, as well as the game console business, made $121 million on revenue of $865 million. In Q3 it made $79 million on revenue of $671 million, and last year it made just $22 million on revenue of $326 million.
While gaming revenue was up, CPU revenue was down—the Computing Solutions segment, which includes x86 processors, APUs, chipsets, embedded processors, and microservers, lost $7 million on revenue of $722 million. The segment brought in less revenue than the $829 million it made in the year-ago quarter, but a loss of $7 million is much better than the year-ago loss of $323 million.
This is AMD's second consecutive quarterly profit—it also made $48 million on revenue of $1.461 billion last quarter—but for fiscal 2013, the company still lost $74 million on revenue of $5.299 billion. AMD CEO Rory Read said in a statement that full-year profitability was one of the company's goals for 2014, and that it would get there by continuing to invest in existing markets while targeting new ones—one of these new efforts will be the ARM-based Opteron chips that are slated to arrive later in the year.
