AMD held on to a surplus at the end of 2022, while Intel fell into a $700 million (open in new tab) deficit over the same period; AMD's client PC sales fell 51%, while "gaming" sales, which include chips for consoles, fell slightly by 7%.

Long story short, AMD is doing quite well given the broader recession and the financial pain other tech giants like Intel and Google are currently experiencing.

The news was released as part of AMD's financial report for the final quarter of 2022 (open in new tab), and while overall profits for the fourth quarter of 2022 were horrific, down 98% to just $21 million, upon closer inspection, AMD's latest numbers are actually quite good.

Overall quarterly sales were up 16% YoY, and AMD blames the decline in profitability largely on write-downs related to its acquisition of FPGA maker Xilinx earlier this year.

Furthermore, looking at the entire year 2022, AMD's revenue increases significantly to $23.6 billion from $16.4 billion in 2021. It is also interesting to note that Intel has revenues of $63 billion in 2022. In other words, Intel is still larger, but the gap is closing. Intel is no longer an order of magnitude ahead of AMD.

It is in servers and embedded chips, rather than gaming, that AMD continues to make significant inroads into Intel's market share. In the fourth quarter, these products brought in $3.1 billion of AMD's $5.6 billion in total sales, thanks to a 42% increase in sales compared to the same period in 2021.

AMD's embedded chip sales jumped a surprising 1,868%. However, most of this surge was the result of AMD's acquisition of Xilinx and the resulting infusion of new embedded chip revenue.

Meanwhile, client CPU revenue, which includes desktop and laptop chips, fell 51%, while AMD's "gaming" segment, which includes Microsoft Xbox, Sony PS5, and Steam Deck, fell 7%, despite what AMD said were increased sales of chips for consoles, including In other words, GPU sales for PCs fell 7%. In other words, sales of GPUs for PCs were poor.

Looking ahead, AMD head Lisa Suh predicts that 2023 will be a tough year for regular PCs, with the PC market shrinking 10% from 290 million units sold in 2022 to 260 million in 2023.

However, Sue also expects AMD's PC outlook to turn around fairly quickly in 2023. 'The first quarter should be the bottom for PCs. From there it will grow into the second quarter and into the second half of the year," Suh said.

AMD also claims that it plans to win over 250 design wins in 2023 for its new Ryzen 7000 series mobile chips, and that the number of notebook PCs with AMD processors will increase by 25% in 2022.

Overall, AMD is largely bucking the negative trend in the technology sector as Intel cuts funding and large companies like Google are hit with a barrage of layoffs (opens in new tab) Given the overall decline in PC sales, AMD s CPU and GPU business is suffering, which is not surprising given the overall decline in PC sales. However, AMD's current dominance in server technology is greater than Intel's, and AMD appears well positioned to weather the current downturn.