According to a new report from Northland, the sales of AMD's processors and graphics chips for client PCs may decline significantly next year. The estimate echoes today's story claiming that AMD will reduce orders to TSMC in the coming quarters due to demand concerns. However, the Northland analyst believes sales of game consoles and AMD's SoCs for PlayStation and Xbox systems will grow in 2023.
Sales of AMD's PC CPUs (which include chips for desktops and laptops) will decrease by 6% year-over-year in 2023, whereas GPU revenue will fab by 7% YoY next year, analyst Gus Richard wrote in a note to investors on Friday, reports SeekingAlpha. In total, AMD will lose $675 million of sales in 2023 due to softening demand for client systems.
Meanwhile, sales of system chips for Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S and Sony's PlayStation 5 will increase by $400 million (up from the previous forecast of $740 million) to around $1.140 billion next year. This number reflects the fact that sales of game consoles usually triple in their third year of lifecycle and 2023 will be their third year.
On the enterprise side of matters, Northland expects sales of AMD's EPYC server CPUs to continue climbing while gaining share. The investment firm estimates AMD's server revenue to increase by 55% yet-over-year (or by $3.1 billion) in 2023. Any impact from other markets will be offset by sales of server parts, the analyst notes. Shipments of Xilinx field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are also expected to drop by 6%, which is natural for post-merge companies.
"We scrubbed our AMD numbers and lower our [2023] estimates to comprehend a global economic slowdown that will likely impact PC CPUs, GPUs, game consoles, and XLNX," Richard wrote in a note to clients," wrote Richard.
In general, companies seem to be quite cautious about sales of their client PC hardware due to global inflation, uncertainties caused by the ongoing bloody Russian-Ukrainian war and global geopolitical tensions. Therefore, it is not surprising to see an investment firm report like this one. However, nobody knows what the future brings, so one should take predictions with a grain of salt or sugar, depending on whether you are an optimist or pessimist.