What AMD’s CFO confirmed is that the company has signed a couple more customers in the semicustom space and that the deal can bring a billion dollars in revenue.
Going beyond gaming
AMD didn’t name any names, but did comment that the contracts have been signed and that the engineering work has started. AMD cannot speak for its partners, but these new semicustom products should be ready in 2016. AMD got the money to start the engineering work on these products.
AMD’s Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Devinder Kumar said:
“Those products will launch sometime in 2016. And timing is only dependent on the customers, I won't comment on that. But what I can come from as we said previously, there are two products, it's a billion dollars of revenue starting sometime in 2016. One of the products is ARM. And the last thing I’ll say is we are looking at our semicustom business as going beyond gaming.”
So now we have confirmation that not all AMD semi-custom designs are just about gaming. Devinder is careful not to reveal too much but we could expect some server products.
There’s still life in consoles
The company is strongly shifting its revenue from CPU and GPU computing, more towards the semicustom business. It all started with the XboX One and Playstation chips and this revenue will continue for the next few years.
Companies like Ouya and now even Nvidia think that Android is the answer to living room gaming, but so far Android consoles have barely scratched the market, mainly because of the lack of high quality games.
This billion dollar semi-custom aspiration is coming from the market beyond games too but we are not sure if AMD hopes to see some semicustom server, network or even embedded chips. This is what new AMD is all about nowadays.
