AMD’s Ryzen line has already won over the critics as a solid line of CPUs that give Intel a run for its money, but it was the consumers that it truly needed to impress in order to survive. With its earnings results coming to light for this year’s first quarter, it seems to have done just that, gaining market share against its competitor.

While AMD managed to secure a modest 8 percent of the market share thanks to the launch of its Zen-based processors back in the final quarter of 2016, it managed to push up to 12 percent by the fourth quarter of 2017. The first quarter of 2018, however, has helped to see a staggering increase in revenue and stock prices.

Given that AMD has its finger in many pies, it’s difficult to discern where to attribute the increases to, be it due to the release of new additions to its Ryzen processor line-up or its Radeon graphics card line. While the best guess is its processors, which have been critically lauded over the past year, as well as the release of 2nd generation Ryzen, it well and truly smashed expectations.

In the first quarter, which ended March 31st, AMD was predicted to make improvements on last year’s loss of 4 cents per share by earning an adjusted 9 cents per share, while revenues were expected to hit $1.57 billion. Instead, the actual results showed AMD at 11 cents per share and a revenue of $1.65 billion, a 40 percent jump from the previous year’s revenue of $1.18 billion.

AMD president and CEO Lisa Su attributes this growth to gaming and data centres in an interview with CNBC, rather than cryptocurrency like more people think.

“We're very happy with how the quarter went and how the year started. For us it's about our long term strategy paying off,” Su said. “We saw a nice ramp across our product lines across our PC, gaming and data center product lines. Gaming is a great market, there are lots and lots of gamers — from casual gamers to real enthusiast gamers — and we're addressing that entire segment. In data center, everyone needs more power in the cloud, so they're really great market segments.”

KitGuru Says: Even if this growth was noticeably thanks to cryptocurrency mining, it has given Intel some competition to watch out for which is exactly what PC enthusiasts need. Prices of GPUs are slowly set to drop anyway, after reports of mining demand slumping, meaning that everyone is a winner. Are you happy that AMD is back in the game?

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