AMD recently unveiled its financial report for the second quarter of 2024, and one highlight is particularly noteworthy: nearly half of the company's sales revenue comes from data center products, rather than traditional PC chips, gaming console accessories, or embedded chips in industrial and automotive sectors.

AMD has achieved remarkable performance in the data center field, with a doubling growth rate. The significant growth this quarter is mainly attributed to its star product, the AMD Instinct MI300 accelerator. This chip competes head-on with Nvidia's renowned H100 AI chip and has shown strong market performance. Its sales exceeded $1 billion in just one quarter, and since its launch in December last year, its cumulative sales have just crossed this milestone. It is worth noting that AMD's Epyc server CPU has also contributed to this achievement.

AMD seems to be following in Nvidia's footsteps. Nvidia has earned a fortune with its Nvidia H100, to the point where it has decided to release a new AI chip every year, accelerating its research and development pace to maintain market leadership and focus on this popular and in-demand product. AMD has also planned a similar annual update strategy: the company reiterated during the financial conference call that it will launch the MI325X in the fourth quarter of this year, the MI350 in 2025, and the MI400 in 2026. AMD CEO Lisa Su revealed that the upcoming MI350 is expected to compete fiercely with Nvidia's Blackwell, which was released in March this year and claims to be the "world's most powerful AI chip". Nvidia has already started sending samples to customers.

Although AMD has made significant progress in the data center business, it still lags behind Nvidia. Nvidia is far ahead in this field. Although AMD's data center business sales reached $2.8 billion this quarter, doubling its performance, Nvidia's sales during the same period reached a staggering $22.6 billion, just breaking the record for data center business performance.

So, what does this trend mean for PC gamers and consumers looking for new chips? Perhaps it can be understood as "one prospers, all prosper" - the injection of funds into the AI field will drive the rapid development of new GPU architectures, and these advancements will also benefit other application scenarios, promoting comprehensive improvement in technological performance. However, at least in 2024, the AI frenzy seems to make the road to new GPUs more difficult for gamers.

However, it is gratifying that AMD has also performed well in the PC CPU and GPU business, achieving growth in the previous quarter. Ryzen CPUs grew by 49% year-on-year and also saw a slight increase compared to the previous quarter. Although the decline in PlayStation and Xbox sales led to a significant 59% decrease in gaming revenue, AMD pointed out that the sales of its Radeon 6000 series GPUs achieved year-on-year growth.

For consumers eagerly awaiting laptops with AMD Zen 5 processors, AMD revealed that over 100 different "platforms" are using its Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" chip for shipping. Although currently the main visible products on the market are from Asus, as well as one announcement from HP and one preview from MSI, Lisa Su confirmed that Acer and Lenovo will also release related products in succession.